MARKETING – GetResponse Blog – Online Marketing Tipshttps://blog.getresponse.com Tue, 26 Sep 2017 19:26:33 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2Social, the Ecommerce Multiplierhttps://blog.getresponse.com/social-ecommerce-multiplier.html https://blog.getresponse.com/social-ecommerce-multiplier.html#respondTue, 26 Sep 2017 19:26:33 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30807Email, SEO, PPC and web design are all different tools that are used in ecommerce, and all provide different functions. Social media is another tool for digital marketers – but it’s a very special tool. It does what it does very well. It helps grow audiences, build brand awareness, extends reach and is a cost-effective […]

]]>Email, SEO, PPC and web design are all different tools that are used in ecommerce, and all provide different functions. Social media is another tool for digital marketers – but it’s a very special tool. It does what it does very well. It helps grow audiences, build brand awareness, extends reach and is a cost-effective method of conversion.

What makes it special is that it helps other forms of ecommerce improve while still doing the job you’re using it for. Social media marketing can help make your email, PPC, SEO and even website design better. Most importantly, it can grow your business. It does this in two ways. Firstly, it can enhance your existing ecommerce marketing to get more customers. Secondly, it can pick up customers that you might otherwise have lost through retargeting.

1. How social enhances ecommerce

Email + Social Media

Email is the backbone of ecommerce. It’s where transactions on the Internet started, and it’s still where a lot of digital communication takes place. As it has been going for 30 years now, long standing companies have built up large databases of customer emails, and these can be imported into Facebook to create your audience. Using Facebook Insights and other tools, you can then find lookalike audiences who you can target with ads.

These targeted audiences are much more likely to like your business, as they already share the same tastes as your returning customer base. Social media can also be used to populate your email database. If you give an exclusive special offer, or give something like a free eBook if they give their email address – then you can build up your email list.

Social media also works best when it’s brief and engaging. If you write a post on Facebook or Twitter, it’s generally recommended that you keep between 80 and 100 characters. That’s great practice for writing great email titles and an engaging first sentence that will show up in the inbox and entice people to open and engage with your email. Emoji are effective too!

SEO + social media

Social media is extremely useful for SEO. One of the ways that you can improve your SERPs is by creating backlinks to other sites. Every social signal – something like a tweet or a share of content you have on your social media – may contribute towards your SERPS. That means the better your social content is, and the more times it’s shared, the better your SEO ranking. Companies that have an active social media presence generally have better SERPs.

If you use blogs as a way to generate backlinks, they can also be used as content in your social feed. As well as the backlinks generated through the blogs, you get the multiplying effect of social media drawing people to that content – and if it’s good enough, sharing it and generating even more of an SEO boost.

You can also use different approaches on different social media platforms to promote your content from different angles. A B2B article is likely to get a lot more interest on a social media site like LinkedIn – whereas a fun blog for ‘10 unexpected benefits of [your business]’ might play better on Facebook. Remember to keep the blog tied in with your core values.

Those who are practiced in SEO know the value of using keywords and being concise. Those skills are directly transferrable to social media. They are important because they give your social copy purpose and relevance, and even more so if they are to be the basis for backlink generation that will effectively increase your SERP.

PPC + social media

The point of pay per click advertising is to get your website above the top of a standard SEO list of pages. In terms of content, you have to be laser focused on getting your message out as quickly as possible. Unsurprisingly, tactics like special offers and money off that work well in PPC also work well in Facebook and other social media – but they work together too.

A PPC link will drive people to the website’s landing page. On that landing page, you can also have links to your social media. If you have a strong social media following, you can also embed that social media within your website – so that people can instantly see the interaction you have with your audience, and the recommendations that come from real people. It will make them more likely to trust the site and take the next step. It also means that PPC can drive people to a website, but also drive them to social media.

2. Retargeting and remarketing

Getting more customers with social media

Once social media, email, SEO and PPC has helped you get more customers or email inquiries, you can use your email list alongside social media like Facebook to find brand new audiences. You can import your email list into a custom audience. Using that you can remarket to people on that list through Facebook ads.

The other benefit is that you can create lookalike audiences from that custom audience. These are people who have similar interests and demographic markers as people who have already bought from you. This means that they are much more likely to convert than people who are targeted on broad demographic lines.

Retargeting

Usually in a sales funnel, you expect to lose audience members at each stage. Not everyone in the total audience you approach will be attracted to your product, less will be interested, even less will make the decision to interact and fewer still will turn that decision into an action to convert.

But there’s something else you can put on your landing page. A Facebook Pixel (other pixels are available). That’s a small piece of code which can track people once they’ve visited your site. If you ever wondered how Amazon targeted you with ads after you looked at a product on their site – now you know how.

Attraction, Interest, Decision, Action: AIDA. We all know the funnel. Using a pixel, customers who would otherwise have been lost can be retargeted. A customer who showed interest by visiting a website has already made their way along part of the customer journey. The pixel can track this, and give them another piece of contact design to move them down the sales funnel.

Retargeting is more successful at converting than regular targeting, as once someone has interacted with your company once, then they are more likely to interact with you again. Using Ad Manager, you can automate retargeting based on the interaction people have had with the website. If they haven’t clicked through, you can give them an incentive to click through.

If they have been on the website, you can show them some pictures of products they might like to get them to interact further. If they have looked at a certain product and backed out – you can give them a time sensitive special offer. The further down the funnel the people go, the more successful the conversion rate of retargeting is. The differing messages also mean the customers don’t suffer from ad fatigue.

Social, the ecommerce multiplier

People go online to solve a problem or be entertained. The old tools of ecommerce are still effective at solving people’s problems online. If someone searches for something they need, SEO and PPC are still going to be effective at getting people’s attention. What they are not as good as are being proactive – of getting their business out there to people who might need it – not those that already do.

Social media is very good at meeting people where their attention already is. On the devices where their attention already is. If the content is good, it can speak to them directly in a language they understand and appreciate. That building of trust and brand awareness is great for growing a company – and it supports the other tools of ecommerce. It builds email lists, it strengthens SEO and it makes PPC more effective. Social media isn’t a competitor for ecommerce – it’s a supercharger.

By the same token, people who have excellent social media followings, but poor PPC, SEO and email strategies will not be getting the most out of their digital marketing. This engine works best when it’s firing on all cylinders. Making all these moving parts work together may seem complicated – people don’t often think of things like consistency of tone, message and design language across email, social and websites – but when these things are in place, the customers can tell. The customers respond. The customers will help you grow your business.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/social-ecommerce-multiplier.html/feed0Content Marketers: Stop Creating and Start Documentinghttps://blog.getresponse.com/start-documenting.html https://blog.getresponse.com/start-documenting.html#respondMon, 25 Sep 2017 17:25:50 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30786In the quest to be heard, it is important to gain your audience’s attention and make sure that you have something of interest to say. This is certainly a mindset that drives content marketers in the modern age, who are constantly striving to target customers through the creation of engaging blog posts, white papers and infographics. […]

]]>In the quest to be heard, it is important to gain your audience’s attention and make sure that you have something of interest to say. This is certainly a mindset that drives content marketers in the modern age, who are constantly striving to target customers through the creation of engaging blog posts, white papers and infographics.

The fact that 61% of customers prefer brands that create custom content also influences the mindset of contemporary marketers, who are inclined to become obsessed with the idea of generating truly innovative narratives while inadvertently compromising on the frequency of their publications and the channels used to distribute content.

Not only can this be detrimental to your brand, but it also ignores the fact that there is a far more simple solution for companies that want to create custom content. But what is this, and how can you put it into action?

Stop creating and start documenting

This solution requires you to change your perspective when creating content, as you document practical experiences and real-time developments within your business rather than attempting to find unique stories or narratives. This enables you to strike the ideal balance between the uniqueness and the frequency of your publications, as you can tap into your brand’s journey and a never-ending stream of potential ideas.

As a result, you can focus on promoting your brand and creating genuine awareness, while speaking authoritatively about something that you have first-hand experience of.

There is also the issue of authenticity, which was the focus of a key 2013 study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group. The results confirmed that customers identified authenticity as one of the top qualities that would attract them to a brand, while audiences are increasingly suspicious of larger corporations and the way in which they utilize content. The notion of documenting an authentic brand journey taps into this, creating a relatable and believable story that customers can buy into.

How can you successfully generate content through documenting?

As you can see, there are obvious benefits to documenting your brand’s journey. In order to capitalize on these, you will need to embrace numerous social media channels while also ensuring that you publish frequently and on a daily basis. Here are some practical steps that will help you to achieve your objectives:

Focus on the attributes, struggles and challenges that define your business

While you may not have to spend as much time brainstorming when documenting your brand and its journey, there is still a need to explore relevant themes and develop a viable content strategy. This ensures that you are able to engage customers over a sustained period of time, while also detailing the characteristics, narratives and challenges that make your brand unique.

Documenting the daily challenges that impact on your business can be particularly effective, as this can help to humanize the brand in the eyes of customers and deliver actionable content that others can learn from. Let’s say that you’re a startup digital marketing brand that is striving to obtain 10,000 Twitter followers, pursuing alternative strategies to achieve this goal.

By documenting your efforts and the experiences of the individuals who are implementing these, you can organically promote your core services while also sharing the type of challenges and aspirations that followers can identify with. The same principle can be applied to product-oriented brands, who can use video to narrate the development of ideas as they brought to life and then to market.

You could achieve a similar aim by encouraging employees to write, record and publish daily diaries for the company blog. The combination of video and text is extremely engaging, while this type of documentation enables you to cover a wider range of commercial challenges and developments. These diary entries can also be used as part of an ongoing and longer-form series of publications, which can help to cultivate loyalty and a genuine interest in the brand.

Aim to produce 5+ pieces of content each day

We have already touched on the importance of frequency, and you and your brand should strive to publish approximately six or seven pieces of meaningful pieces of documented content each day.

This is central to any content marketing campaign, as it is a proactive and consistent approach to publishing that ultimately builds brand awareness, cultivates relationships through thought leadership and successfully converts leads.

It is also important that you use an integrated social platform to share your content, focusing on the behavior of your core users and embracing relatively new platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.

Aside from your own company blog, these two platforms should as serve as staple publication resources, along with Facebook (and the live streaming channel Facebook Live) and YouTube. Snapchat is particularly relevant due to its unique storytelling feature, which allows you to use images and video to document daily events that occur within your business. Not only does this leverage various elements of rich media, but the fact that narratives are deleted after 24 hours lends a sense of urgency that compels followers to share.

You can also include niche social media channels depending on your core demographics, as you look to publish content that will resonate with your customers. An estimated 81% of Pinterest users are women, so this is ideal for brands that wish to document their journey and appeal to a largely female audience.

In summary: why documenting can help your brand grow

In the digital age, Millennials have emerged as the single most dominant and influential consumer group. This has helped to underpin the rise of content marketing in recent times, while 62% of Millennials also expect brands to engage them regularly through various social media networks.

This has encouraged many brands to begin an obsessive pursuit of innovative content, which has proved increasingly difficult in an age where social media is saturated with branded copy, videos and images.

This why documentation is such an effective alternative, as it provides truly unique content that can promote your brand organically while sharing a telling insight into the daily events at a thriving business.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/start-documenting.html/feed0Top 15 Content Marketing Tips for New Entrepreneurshttps://blog.getresponse.com/content-marketing-tips-entrepreneurs.html https://blog.getresponse.com/content-marketing-tips-entrepreneurs.html#respondThu, 21 Sep 2017 17:01:06 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30774Doubtful on how to use content marketing effectively? Learn tips and tricks on how to rule the content marketing world. Content marketing is known to be a crucial aspect in the field of a start-up business where the promotional activities are a must. The sphere of content writing and content marketing is all about new […]

]]>Doubtful on how to use content marketing effectively? Learn tips and tricks on how to rule the content marketing world. Content marketing is known to be a crucial aspect in the field of a start-up business where the promotional activities are a must. The sphere of content writing and content marketing is all about new thoughts and creativity that can enhance the business of a company or an organization.

This is a way to represent a business before the masses. The large-scale business organizations and companies are known to be quite experienced and expert in the arena of marketing the content. These traditional ideas are somewhat adopted and are the foundations for fresh thoughts.

As we know, that idea grows in wild profusion, new business startups are known to come up with new ideas for content marketing, and new means of promotions are ushering in.

Creating content is about knowing the industry well and incorporating all the necessary information to enrich the article. This is followed by publishing and then distribution.

A few key aspects that are to be encapsulated while creating meaningful content can be:

The content must be appealing enough to attract the common people.

Expansion of customer base and generation of lead is important.

An increase in online sales is crucial as well.

Spreading the content online is important as the use of the internet and social media is spurting day by day.

Content that is suitable for all ages is preferred, content for the older ones must use classic languages, and traditional form of writing whereas content for this generation can use peppy language as well.

Reflecting own thoughts by engaging people is imperative for content to involve more and more people.

15 content marketing tips for entrepreneurs

“For a startup, content marketing can be a great way to increase the visibility of their site” says Rahul Agarwal founder of Designhill. He further adds “From beginning we focused on effective content marketing, which greatly helped our bootstrapped business to turn into a successful venture without spending much.” Here are some useful content marketing tips he would like to share with our readers:

The Internet has become an important part of our daily lives, helping us out in many doubts, problems, requirements, etc. Hence, a small business should always have a sophisticated website that is user-friendly too. This helps in spreading the information about the business and makes us feel the existence of the organization over online sites. An online website ought to be composed and developed well with appropriate blogs and contents so that it can reflect the ideas and concepts very clearly. Internet being the information superhighway, searching online is widely in vogue these days.

The golden rule of content marketing is to create your brand identity through your content. Placing graphic design elements like logos, watermark, etc. is essential on your content so as to let people know about your brand as well as to prevent content copying.

The aspect of the scarcity of time and budget is a rising issue in many a company, and hence, the traditional marketing budget is to be saved for fresh ways and means. Traditional ideas did not include social media pages and use of social media posts. These ideas are to be included so that maximum number of people can be reached in a short timeframe.

Online or social media tracking is helpful to monitor how people perceive the content. For spreading the content, social media sites and social media posts can serve the purpose and can easily be tackled by any company as well. This helps in getting hold of customer choice and preference.

Using social media is imperative these days when state of the art technology is ushering in. The use of Facebook pages, What’s App groups, Instagram and Twitter, are completely in vogue with the contemporary societal structure.

The content ought to be aesthetically convenient and technically sophisticated as well. One should always keep in mind the endeavors made by the content developers and the preference of the viewers as well.

Establishing the company through the content is a must. To convey the intricacies of the services provided and how that can help us is a must for the content to reflect. The content is to reflect the purpose of the company.

To spread the content in an aesthetic manner so that it can reach a maximum number of the masses, flyers, posters and gift cards are generally used. These are appealing ways to spread the message that is tried to be portrayed through the content.

Generally, start-up business plans are to be highlighted in front of the masses and hence, the content is known to contain climax and punch lines. Short, crisp, appealing and interesting content is always preferred where keywords are used in quite a witty manner. The keyword density is to be kept in mind. The wordplay does matter a lot.

Retain uniqueness of content as small business needs to establish them as something different.

The SEO write ups for a small business ought to be smartly composed so that passion and courtesy are well balanced. The contents are always expected to intermingle transparency and rigidity.

Social media marketing is important when it comes to the aspect of content marketing for small business.

Product packaging and labels are also considered as a part of content marketing, and hence is known to provide with such convenient services.

Custom made logos and symbols for content are always preferred by start-up companies where affordability matters for the small business. The pocket pinch of the clients is to be kept in mind.

The content for small business should be developed in such a manner so that the customer can relate to the content. The content should resonate with the masses and ought to echo the client’s demands as well. The language ought to be lucid enough for people of all age groups.

The layman should be infused and completely involved in the content. These days media skills are important for the firmament of content marketing as the use of social networking sites, and online searches are widely in vogue.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/content-marketing-tips-entrepreneurs.html/feed0Implementing Social Media Marketing to See Exponential Business Growthhttps://blog.getresponse.com/social-media-marketing-business-growth.html https://blog.getresponse.com/social-media-marketing-business-growth.html#respondMon, 18 Sep 2017 15:33:48 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30746Social media has been a fad for most firms and entrepreneurs in the past. To them, it was a temporary interest that faded with the passage of time. On the other hand, there have been some entrepreneurs and businesses that have used social media widely for their business promotion and marketing. They have received immense […]

]]>Social media has been a fad for most firms and entrepreneurs in the past. To them, it was a temporary interest that faded with the passage of time. On the other hand, there have been some entrepreneurs and businesses that have used social media widely for their business promotion and marketing. They have received immense success. When it comes to targeted traffic to their websites and revenue generated there has been no looking back at all.

Social media is an excellent tool for businesses today to grow and establish their brand presence in the market. However, when it comes to the use of social media for their market needs and promotion, most entrepreneurs are not even aware of how to use it correctly. This is why they get no results and abandon social media entirely for their promotion and marketing uses. Lack of understanding is the key issue that makes them leave social media for the benefits of their company and business.

Why is social media popular today?

There are solid reasons as to why you as an entrepreneur should embrace social media for your business today. The following are the primary reasons for you to embrace social media and make it a part and parcel of your business:

Wide platform – it gives you a comprehensive platform, and this is why you should use it for promoting your brand. You can provide followers descriptions of your product or service. Post images and videos of them to invoke trust.

Cost effective – platforms are free and if you want you can make an affordable social media ad to market them to your followers and their network. The costs of these ads are cheaper over conventional advertisements for your brand or product.

Accessibility – platforms are accessed by people from all across the globe. All you need to do is create an account and make a business page for your company. All updates, content, and posts can be uploaded and shared with ease.

Reach – it helps you to transcend local barriers when it comes to customer reach. In fact, when customers get regular posts and updates from your end, brand loyalty increases. This goes a very long way to make your presence felt in the market.

It is a useful tool when it comes to your business promotion and marketing. No matter how big or large your business might be, it is prudent for you to create a profile on prominent social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc.

Education and awareness

Companies and businesses claim that when it comes to social media marketing and promotion, the platforms help them in spreading awareness and education. If you take a look at people today, they will log into their social media platforms at least three to four times a week. Some people have social apps installed on their smartphones, and this gives them the chance to check their social pages even every time they receive a notification. This is an added advantage to the company specializing in a particular niche to reach out to their followers and spread information and knowledge about their services and products.

Social media improves your visibility

With the help of the above social media pages, you can establish and invoke your visibility. This primarily helps you to get the best for your needs. At the same time, when you take a look at social media platforms, you will find that if any of your followers find your post or content interesting or engaging, they share your posts with their followers. This chain is created, and so you get better visibility on the search engine ranks. This boosts search engine optimization and the chances of you receiving better-targeted traffic and profits.

Invokes trust and confidence

In addition to online visibility, social media pages also help you to invoke confidence in the market. You can help your followers with recent news and updates. You can give you practical solutions especially if you are dealing in a niche where education and awareness are important. For example, in the case of business debts, you might need some guidance as to how to apply or even repay debts. Social media pages of debt relief companies will give you information on useful tools like debt consolidation services that will help you understand the process and procedures for repayment of all your debts without tensions and stress.

Reputation for your company

It is important for you to open an account on social media platforms and begin to communicate with your followers to give them a personal touch. This will help you receive feedback from customers and clients for the improvement of your services and products. Moreover, when you receive real feedback from your customers or clients, you get the chance to improve and innovate your business. Even their ideas and suggestions can promote massive transformation in your business.

Therefore, social media platforms are indispensable for the development and the growth of your business today. Reap their benefits and connect with your customers or clients in real. With this simple gesture and some amount of time on your social media platform, you can improve brand awareness, customer loyalty, consistent revenue, web presence and targeted traffic on your website without any hassles at all!

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/social-media-marketing-business-growth.html/feed0ResponseCon2017: Roundtable Events & Registrationhttps://blog.getresponse.com/responsecon2017-roundtable-events.html https://blog.getresponse.com/responsecon2017-roundtable-events.html#respondThu, 14 Sep 2017 23:51:55 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30741Like any good conference, ResponseCon is going to feature some educational opportunities. Our wonderful keynote speakers, of course, will be the start of these chances. But let me tell you about our roundtable discussions and workshops. If you want to learn about the power of digital marketing, this is the place for you! At each […]

]]>Like any good conference, ResponseCon is going to feature some educational opportunities. Our wonderful keynote speakers, of course, will be the start of these chances. But let me tell you about our roundtable discussions and workshops.

If you want to learn about the power of digital marketing, this is the place for you!

At each of our four ResponseCon events, our second conference day will be designed around teaching you everything you need to know – up to and including how to make money with GetResponse through our affiliate, agency, and partner programs.

Marketing Certification

What’s going to be really new during our ResponseCon workshops is our digital marketing certification. If you attend the ResponseCon workshops, you’ll be among the first to become certified in our marketing automation and email marketing programs. You’ll learn such vital online marketing topics such as:

Mobile conversion optimization

Improving customer service with email

Using content marketing with email

Deliverability tips and list hygiene best practices

KPIs and analytics for marketing automation

Partnership Programs

If you’re interested in building your income (and who isn’t?), then you’ll have the opportunity to learn about the partner programs that work for you. We have dedicated programs for affiliates, to make money with GetResponse. If you work for an advertising or marketing agency, we have a program for you as well. Staff for both of these will be on-hand to talk with you about them. And, we have a partner program for online marketers, too.

Also at our roundtable discussions, you’ll be able to talk to our education experts directly, and get a second set of eyes on your marketing problems. You’ll have the chance to try out the latest in marketing tech, and get a dedicated demonstration of GetResponse software.

Does that sound good to you? We look forward to seeing you at one of our ResponseCon events in:

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/responsecon2017-roundtable-events.html/feed0Top SEO Marketing Tactics to Reach the Mobile-First Generationhttps://blog.getresponse.com/top-seo-marketing-tactics.html https://blog.getresponse.com/top-seo-marketing-tactics.html#respondTue, 12 Sep 2017 14:04:15 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30705Today’s internet users are increasingly, and in some segments overwhelmingly, getting their content from mobile devices. A 2016 survey found that more young people now use social media than television as their main news source, an indication of just how dominant mobile now is. What does it all mean for today’s SEO marketing? Indexing is changing […]

]]>Today’s internet users are increasingly, and in some segments overwhelmingly, getting their content from mobile devices. A 2016 survey found that more young people now use social media than television as their main news source, an indication of just how dominant mobile now is. What does it all mean for today’s SEO marketing?

Indexing is changing

Making websites mobile-friendly is no longer an optional extra; it should be central to your marketing strategy from the start. Despite this, a large number of organizations still believe that the same SEO tactics they use for desktop sites can be carried over to mobile content with minimal adaptation. Even to the extent that this was partly true in the past, it is likely to become increasingly less so as Google adopts mobile-first indexing to an ever-greater degree. The direction of travel is clear, and businesses which do not adapt will quickly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

But rankings matter even more

A startling statistic shows that half of mobile users are prepared to wait no longer than three seconds for a page to load. This impatience also applies to search results: many of those who have grown up with mobile are even less inclined than desktop users to look beyond the top of the search ranking page. The smaller screen of smartphones and tablets make browsing through multiple search results a relatively cumbersome process. Sites at the top of the list may therefore get an even greater boost than previously, so hiring a good search marketing agency could really help with ensuring your business remains visible on search in order to achieve your digital marketing goals.

Hit mobile-friendly keywords

The mobile revolution has also transformed how people use search. When almost everyone accessed the internet from desktop or laptop PCs, someone looking for the best pizza in Manchester was probably thinking about home delivery. Now, they’re may be standing in the street during a night out. For that reason, hitting a search string like “pizza near [location]” can bring great rewards. Short, snappy words and phrases are likely to attract the mobile-first generation more than in-depth discussions. Voice search is increasingly important, and providers of SEO services are adapting fast.

Don’t block web crawlers

If Google’s robots are unable to access resources that make it clear a page is written for mobile browsing, the desktop version of the site may end up featuring highly in searches made from phones. This can have potentially serious knock-on effects, such as the dominance of unplayable Flash videos on certain pages, which mobile users do not react well to. Combined with the unwillingness of mobile users to persevere with uncooperative sites, the net result is likely to be that your content will be lost to its intended audience – and perhaps worse, the site may receive considerable negative word-of-mouth.

Optimize for app stores

Creating an app can bring great rewards in profitability and reputation, but app stores are crowded. If yours doesn’t stand out from the crowd, it’s not going to get traction in the first place. Research the terms people search on app stores – often not the same as those they’d use on standard web content. Then, make sure the content in your app is rich in these keywords. Although app store optimization is not a new idea, the ever-increasing dominance of mobile devices makes it more important than ever.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/top-seo-marketing-tactics.html/feed0Effective Strategies to Promote Your Podcasts with Social Media & Searchhttps://blog.getresponse.com/promote-podcasts-social-search.html https://blog.getresponse.com/promote-podcasts-social-search.html#respondMon, 11 Sep 2017 16:02:38 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30699A podcast is a set of digital audio files that are available for download. Users can subscribe to podcasts and receive them as soon as they get uploaded. The popularity of podcasts has multiplied at an overwhelming pace over the past few years. They are becoming increasingly popular, and the average number of podcast subscribers […]

]]>A podcast is a set of digital audio files that are available for download. Users can subscribe to podcasts and receive them as soon as they get uploaded. The popularity of podcasts has multiplied at an overwhelming pace over the past few years. They are becoming increasingly popular, and the average number of podcast subscribers is greater than ever.

A podcast is a dynamic, powerful and an effective marketing tool for businesses. They leverage podcasts for a number of uses. Podcasts can be benefitted by business to establish their authoritative presence in the industry.

The size of the audience you can engage, influence and mobilize through podcasts directly depends on how well you promote your podcasts.

Promotion through social media

Social media is a great means of communication. Here are some strategies to promote your podcasts with social media.

Maximize audience

Social media holds quite a diverse audience, from all over the world. The real deal is to influence and mobilize the maximum possible audience through your social media presence and then promote your podcasts before them.

Facebook and Instagram are the two ideal platforms for execution of such strategies. You can influence and engage a lot of audiences to promote your podcasts in an effective manner.

In Facebook’s case, you can either opt for organic growth and attract readers through your content, or leverage third-party tools to maximize your followers.

Instagram is quite the rage these days, and you can effectively promote your podcasts here. Instagram offers the highest rate of engagement amongst its alternatives, which means that it is perhaps the best platform to communicate with your audience and influence them to promote your podcasts. You’ll need a large Instagram community to promote your podcasts in an effective manner. There are quite a lot of methods and strategies that you can try and implement to gain real followers on Instagram and influence the maximum audience possible.

Promote your podcasts efficiently

Obviously, you can promote your podcasts on social media by uploading Facebook/Instagram posts, but there are some things that you need to get right, to extract the maximum results.

Initially, you must post at the optimum time. Getting your timing right is quite important on social networking platforms as it can have a massive impact on the reach of your posts. You can acquire services from online marketing tools to calculate the ideal times to upload and maximize reach and engagement on the respective posts.

In order to ensure that your post reaches to the maximum possible audience, you can pin the post on your Facebook page. In the case of Instagram, you can upload the promotional post as your Instagram story.

If you can afford paid advertising, what is better than leveraging Facebook ads and Instagram adverts to promote your podcast through social media? These paid means of advertising are extremely effective as you can select your targeted audience and promote your podcasts before them.

Creating hype on your social media pages/accounts before the release of a new podcast is another brilliant idea. You can upload posts a day or two before the release of your podcast. Not only will it create hype around its release, but will serve as a reminder for a lot of users who’re already interested in your podcasts.

Promotion with search engines

A lot of traffic can be driven towards podcasts using search engines (know as search engine optimization, or SEO). It is essential to ensure that your podcasts are search engines friendly, to drive greater traffic towards your podcasts. There are many Google SEO ranking factors to consider if you want to rank your podcasts in search engines. While this statement may seem a bit vague, here are some methods to promote your podcasts with search engines, which will provide you with a better understanding of this section.

Titles

Yes, podcasts are entirely audio based, but titles aren’t and here’s when SEO applies to podcasts. By optimizing your podcast titles, you can make them search engine friendly and attract a lot of traffic. Your titles must be engaging, interesting and must be based on keywords, in order to ensure maximum results.

Include a transcript

Including a transcript with your podcasts is the best method to get higher search rankings. A transcript provides the maximum information of what the podcast states, to the search engine and as a result, the search engine is more likely to rank you higher in the search.

Avoid useless keyword stuffing

In a pursuit to stuff in the maximum number of keywords, you may end up ruining the whole written content. You should never go overboard with keywords as high-quality content must be privileged instead of a heap of keywords.

Establish and maintain a blog

A blog is quite useful for good SEO results. Blog posts can get ranked higher in the search results due to many reasons.

Initially, if a blog is associated with your podcasts, it acts as an additional authenticity certificate before the search engine.

Another major reason is that blogging can help you establish healthy links with renowned and reliable ratings websites. It would result in getting your podcasts ranked higher up the search rankings.

Moreover, the images you add to your blogs will also help you promote podcasts through social media. Upon adding images in your blogs, you should carefully craft the alt-text of the images around keywords, and it will make it easier for search engines to locate you.

If you haven’t started blogging yet, what are you waiting for? You must create a WordPress blog and try to extract the most benefit out of it for the search engine optimization of your podcasts.

With an effective podcast SEO, you can get your podcasts listed high in the search rankings. This will make it easier for you to promote your podcasts and attract an audience through search engines.

In conclusion

Podcasts are a great way to build awareness and authority in your niche – if you can get people to listen to the podcasts. Using promotional channels like social media and optimizing your podcast for search engines are surely ways to get some eyes and ears on your efforts.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/promote-podcasts-social-search.html/feed0Hey Marketer, World Space Week is Just Around the Cornerhttps://blog.getresponse.com/world-space-week.html https://blog.getresponse.com/world-space-week.html#respondThu, 07 Sep 2017 02:27:27 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30687Not all of us are astronauts and not every business is out of this world exciting. But, during #WorldSpaceWeek anyone, anywhere can become an intergalactic star lord, creating the perfect opportunity for businesses to market the world (see what I did there?) out of their audience. 46% of any Holiday shopping happens online, what’s more, […]

]]>Not all of us are astronauts and not every business is out of this world exciting. But, during #WorldSpaceWeek anyone, anywhere can become an intergalactic star lord, creating the perfect opportunity for businesses to market the world (see what I did there?) out of their audience.

46% of any Holiday shopping happens online, what’s more, Social Media Examiner reminds us that more than half of those shoppers are influenced by social media. With these stats we have to take into consideration ads, hashtags, and keywords to take advantage of the social media waves that hit right before the end of year Holiday season.

What’s more, Space Week commemorates the first human-made satellite launched, Sputnik 1, on 4 October 1957 and the signing of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space on 10 October 1967. Cool stuff, right? What’s even cooler is that with all events, promotion, and education there is a chosen theme for every year helping all institutions (and marketers – wink, wink) stay within the realms of a specific topic.

So, I thought of three very universal things that I hear people talk about a lot and popped them into Google Trends:

Muffins are trying hard but they’re no competition for the universe or tablets, we Google things we have, we’re looking for, we’re buying, we’re interested in. As marketers, we are tasked with merging two seemingly unrelated ideas by taking advantage of hashtag trends and national holidays that could bump our product up in searches and social media – one of these trends is #WorldSpaceWeek. This is where we begin piecing together the theme and the hashtag to board the intergalactic digital train.

Intergalactic travel lookbook

We talk quite a lot about transparency and marketing with a big dash of truth. Who are the people behind the brand? Are they like me? Can they joke, laugh, or take an interest in what’s currently going on? The answer should always be – We can use marketing to show you we have a side you can bond with!

From reactive marketing to storytelling there various ways your email, blog, and social media could get that fresh space glow. The British Geological Survey had a brilliant post that could put a smile on anyone’s face:

This geology of #Mars map shows the craters on the surface exceptionally well. Can any of you spot the 'smiley crater'? #WSW2015 #WorldSpaceWeek

Simple. Although geology could easily relate to space (So. Many. Space. Rocks.) they are not necessarily NASA, but they took an opportunity to rock the heck out of using World Space Week to increase engagement on their Facebook.

Are you more of foodie marketer? No worries, Subway and TGI Friday’s also go in on the action:

It's Space Week and our cookies are out of this world! Head in store now and try one out! #WorldSpaceWeek

My personal favorite are products that were made special just for a holiday or occasion. Whether it is a specialty offer or a limited edition item, letting your customers and prospects experience the “limited time only” part of ecommerce will get their interest. It’s all about psychology. Murals Wallpaper made #WorldSpaceWeek fashionable:

To celebrate #WorldSpaceWeek, we have added four brand new & out of this world NASA images to our already impressive space collection.Check them out today – http://buff.ly/1L4oM7c

Houston, this is Marketer 007, come in

First things first, should you prepare your own content or just share what is available (NASA or World Space Week official content)?

It’s up to you. As you saw in our lookbook above most brands opted for making their products the center of a cosmic-related sale. However, if you are looking to start conversations in order to increase engagement, show your human side, or just simply want to share some knowledge with your customers or fans (hey, some of you might be speakers, bloggers, and webinar marketing stars!) it would be a great to share a link to a reputable source with an article that will rock their socks off.

Is there any way you can go too far?

Yes, you definitely can. Dinosaur compiled a list of social media gaffes and it’s the perfect drawing board for what to do and what not to do. Sometimes your business just what it is – always on topic, always formal, it may not be a good idea to post jokes, memes, or even unrelated content.

“The holidays provide businesses with a way to connect with the audience on a more human level…because they allow us to communicate as people who share similar traditions, or they allow us to talk about what makes us unique. How that might play out: Show how the people in your company celebrate or honor certain traditions, to give your fans and prospects an idea of the people and personalities that make your company what it is. It’s also a great time to showcase any charitable activities your company might participate in.”

Space is a kind of tradition, unique journey, and celebration that we all take part in. Why not use #WorldSpaceWeek to join the community? This year’s theme is particularly good – “Exploring New Worlds In Space.” That’s worth preparing your marketing for!

Have you ever taken part in #WorldSpaceWeek? Maybe you’ve got some tips or ideas for how to make this year’s theme particularly marketing-esque? Share your thoughts in the comments and as always – May the Force be with you!

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/world-space-week.html/feed0The 5 Biggest Threats to Your Blogging Effortshttps://blog.getresponse.com/biggest-threats-blogging-efforts.html https://blog.getresponse.com/biggest-threats-blogging-efforts.html#respondTue, 05 Sep 2017 20:28:08 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30670You’ve invested in blogging, including all that time and effort. You don’t want to waste your resources by allowing things to interfere with your progress. These are five of the biggest threats that can harm your blogging efforts. With each threat comes the risk that you’ll lose opportunities, so it’s important you avoid them at […]

]]>You’ve invested in blogging, including all that time and effort. You don’t want to waste your resources by allowing things to interfere with your progress.

These are five of the biggest threats that can harm your blogging efforts. With each threat comes the risk that you’ll lose opportunities, so it’s important you avoid them at all cost. This article will give you what you need to know to do so.

1. A distraction-filled office threatens your productivity.

What does your current office space look like?

Is it messy? Do you have an excessive number of unnecessary items on your desk? Where is it located in the room?

Your office setting can either help or hurt your productivity, so it’s important you design a place that optimizes instead of hinders. Some of the ways to do this are to pay attention to:

Distractions

Organization

Location

Distractions

When you’re trying to concentrate on your blog writing, one of your worst enemies is distractions. These can include phone noises, recreational websites, and even those fidget spinners everyone’s raving about.

How can you prevent these distractions from threatening your productivity?

You have options, such as downloading or installing productivity apps. Some of the best distraction-fighting apps are:

RescueTime, a tool featuring website blocking and tracking how you’re spending your time both on and offline

The Do Not Disturb feature on your iPhone, which will silence all calls and other notifications during a set time period

Distractions can slow down your writing and contribute to missed deadlines. Unless you’re working on your blog promotion on social media, block those sites in your browser with StayFocusd. Track your level of distraction with RescueTime to see what you need to do to improve your productivity. Turn off all notifications on your iPhone or Android phone with a do not disturb feature to prevent even a vibration from distracting you.

Organization

As a committed blog writer, you’re committing much of your time on your efforts. If your workstation is a mess though, you’ll see your productivity decline. That’s why it’s critical to have an organized space to write.

What’s considered an organized space?

The truth is there is no universal definition of “organized” because it depends on you. To determine how to organize your space, you need to know what will work best for you. You don’t want papers and other miscellaneous items everywhere, but you do want to set up your space in a way that helps your own productivity.

Some prefer to have a clear desk with nothing more than their computer in sight. This helps them focus on writing and nothing more. On the other hand, some writers want to include items that help inspire or get them in the mood to write. This can include scents to keep them calm, for example.

To determine how you should organize your workstation, you need to know your own mind. What should you have on your desk to help your writing productivity? What should you remove that would only distract you? When you know how to organize your own space, you’re on your way to improved productivity.

Location

Do you control where you write? If yes, that’s great because you have more opportunities to find the ideal place for your needs. You’ll be able to experiment with different locations to see what works and what doesn’t. It may take a few tries, but once you know the best setting for you, your writing will benefit from it.

When you work in a team environment, you might not have much control over your office location. That’s okay. There are still ways you can create a beneficial setting. It may require a bit of creativity from your end, but it is possible to make your space just as effective as if you were writing from anywhere.

A couple ways you can create a setting when you don’t have direct sunlight or a nearby window:

Purchase plants that don’t require sunlight, such as bromeliads and other options from this list.

Invest in a sun lamp for artificial sunlight, which can improve your mood, too.

2. A disorganized calendar threatens your consistency.

Do you keep a calendar for your blog? If you do, is it organized or more like a cluttered mess?

Keeping a calendar is key to staying on top of your various blog topics and deadlines, but it’s not enough to just have a system in place. It needs to be well-organized to prevent confusion and error.

Keep your blog calendar separate from everything else.

Is your blog schedule on the same Google or Outlook calendar as the rest of your personal or work items? This does help to have everything in one place, but more likely, it makes a mess of everything. Your calendar will more likely grow out of control with multiple items scheduled at the same times. It will start looking like a work of colorful art instead of a manageable system.

You have options for how to maintain a structured, separate, and manageable calendar. It’s all a matter of which one works for your needs and budget.

The DIY calendar. When you have zero budget for a paid calendar service, you can still organize your blog calendar in a free program, such as Google Sheets or Excel. If you are still committed to the idea of using an actual calendar, such as Google Calendar, make sure you create a separate option for all your blogging tasks. Use a noticeably different color for it, too.

The third-party service. So you have a designated budget for purchasing a calendar service. Great! This means your options increase tremendously, and the amount of manual work decreases even more. The top tool for blog calendar management is CoSchedule.

The free template. If you don’t want to start from scratch but also don’t want to buy a program, you’re in luck. Several blog leaders have created templates you can access for free. They give you a structure you can follow so that you don’t have to struggle to organize everything yourself. As an example: CoSchedule has a recent, handy article and template for blog calendar management. You can find a collection of others in Curata’s article on the subject.

When you have a well-managed blog calendar, your risk of inconsistency lessens. You’ll see your timelines and more likely reach your deadlines, which in turn keeps your blog schedule consistent and reliable. No matter which approach you take to a blog calendar, select something you can maintain for the long term.

3. Your inner critic threatens your writing.

It’s likely you’ve heard that inner voice while you’re writing, telling you what needs to change and what isn’t working. Your focus should be on getting your thoughts and ideas onto paper first before worrying about changes. Your inner critic can make that difficult.

Your inner critic will insist on perfection, but that can only lead to negativity and then delays. With so much on your plate already, you can’t afford to allow these delays. That’s why it’s time you silence your inner critic.

These are some useful ways to give your inner critic the back seat as you write:

Listen to upbeat music. When you sit in silence, your mind has full control over what you hear, especially that dreaded inner critic. Listen to music to drown out this negativity and distraction.

Expect distractions before they happen. Learn the workings of your inner critic so that you’re better prepared when it comes out in full force. If you know your critic will disapprove of a certain content piece, be aware of it. You’ll then have more luck with putting those thoughts to the side.

Keep a journal.Journaling is a handy way to silence or calm your inner critic. You can remove the negativity and educate yourself on the inner workings of your mind.

Don’t expect the critic to vanish. Your mind won’t be silenced completely when you write, so it’s important to recognize it’s there. When you accept its presence, you’ll have more power to push it aside.

Your inner critic won’t simply vanish, so it’s key that you learn what you can about it. When you know more about yourself, you’re better prepared for any distractions while you write.

4. A limited social media presence threatens your reach.

You can write one hundred amazing blog articles, but without any social media promotion, your web traffic will be limited. In addition to that social media activity, you need to have people there who are listening to you.

It’s essential to have your own established social media presence with a dependable following. That way, you’ll see people engaging with your blog content and increasing your content’s reach.

Choose the most important platforms to focus your efforts.

You have many social platforms you can build a presence on. It can seem a bit daunting, so you need to decide where to concentrate your efforts.

Instead of worrying about being everywhere, be where your potential blog audience is seeking out content. It’s not only about being where they’re active. They need to be actively engaging with content like yours. Some platforms, such as Instagram, aren’t the best place for content promotion, so you need to research which platforms are best for both your audience and your content.

Build influence to attract readers

Once you have accounts on your top social media platforms, it’s time to build your presence. You have work to do initially that takes time and patience, but the rewards make it worth it in the end.

Set up your profiles completely and effectively. Optimizing your social profiles gives you the opportunity to attract and retain a following. For example, on your Twitter profile, use hashtags in your bio to be found for specific keywords. Also, after building your profile activity a bit more, request verification from the platforms that offer it, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Those verification marks make your accounts more legitimate and build your influence.

Know who you’re trying to reach. You may have your reader personas established, but you should do the same research on your social audience as well. Find out how they communicate and the keywords they search for the most. This will help you create social posts that they find and engage with.

Engage in real-time. It’s essential that you don’t simply schedule blog content promotion and leave it at that. You’ll want to be human and engage with other users in real time. This will help you build relationships and give your social accounts a more loyal following. Use @ mentions to notify users that your content cites them or that they might appreciate your article. Reach out to influencers to see if they’ll share your content with their own audiences. These can all help you drive interested readers to your blog.

So, are you feeling overwhelmed yet? Don’t worry. There are many social media resources to assist you with building and maintaining your social presence. Some of the best options are:

When all else fails, you can refer to the content marketer’s holy grail of social media survival. Content Marketing Institute created a social media guide with over 50 tips to assist bloggers.

To be effective at blogging, you cannot afford to ignore social media promotion. Yes, you have SEO traffic, but social media is still an essential part of blog success. Build your presence to drive targeted traffic to your blog, and you’ll see a better reach when they decide to share your content as well.

5. The wrong blog site host threatens your reliability.

There’s nothing worse than putting all the effort into driving traffic to your blog just to see your website crash. This inconvenient disruption hurts your traffic and makes you look less reliable and professional.

You need to invest in a blog web host that will keep your website up and loading quickly and reliably. You don’t have to choose an overly expensive host to keep everything running. There are plenty of cheap web hosts to choose from.

If you have a WordPress blog, you likely decided to self-host your website. However, new bloggers might want to evaluate whether to stick with a free platform or self-hosting.

Your influence and thought leadership depend on blog traffic. An unreliable web host will damage your brand image and lead to missed opportunities. Additionally, Google won’t rank your content if your website keeps going down. This is all why you need to find a website host that you can rely on.

— — —

These five threats to your blog are high-risk but easily avoidable when you commit to preventing them. By not taking steps to avoid these threats, you’re accepting the likelihood of:

Poor productivity

Inconsistency

Restricted writing power

Limited content reach

Unreliability

You are now aware of how to optimize your blogging efforts to prevent these risks, so it’s time to commit yourself to maintaining your prevention strategies.

Has your blog hit any of these five roadblocks? What are you doing to fix or prevent any risks you face to your blogging efforts? Leave a comment with your answers!

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/biggest-threats-blogging-efforts.html/feed0What’s in the Cards for Marketing Automation?https://blog.getresponse.com/whats-cards-marketing-automation.html https://blog.getresponse.com/whats-cards-marketing-automation.html#commentsThu, 31 Aug 2017 20:56:12 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30656Automation, as a concept, is constantly evolving. Once upon a time, it was steam technology and the industrial revolution. Today, complex programming and advances in AI are opening up exciting, sometimes troubling, possibilities for the future of automation. I want to focus here on two potential implications of automation on the marketing industry in the […]

]]>Automation, as a concept, is constantly evolving. Once upon a time, it was steam technology and the industrial revolution. Today, complex programming and advances in AI are opening up exciting, sometimes troubling, possibilities for the future of automation.

I want to focus here on two potential implications of automation on the marketing industry in the near future. For you, marketing friends, I hope you come away with a sense of where to focus your energies, and how to evaluate potential automation services.

These two areas of innovation are:

The difficulty in managing automation workflows. There is still a long way to go in the usability design of automation services, which can be difficult for marketers to wrap their heads around.

The problems presented by automation when it comes to public relations. As automation becomes more common, consumers become sensitive to automated messages. They crave human interaction, especially when they have a grievance.

Problem solving: usability, workflow, and automation squared.

“Automation squared” is my little colloquialism for the most pressing demand for innovation in automation for marketing. Whoa, that was a lot of buzzwords in a single sentence — so let’s break it down. The most pressing problem with automation is, well automation. The process of creating a marketing automation workflow itself needs to be simpler. It needs to be automated.

The ability to perform automation squared also relies on a shift from reactive to predictive technology. This is a large gap in what automation can currently achieve, though solutions are coming with time and sophistication.

Prediction relies not just on volume of data, but on the ability to sift through it and generate take-aways. The kinds of correlations and causational relationships useful to statisticians. Then a service should be able to display, and even apply that information to a workflow.

At the moment, data analysis requires a great number of man-hours, thus our current reliance on reactive information. The kinds of analytical tools to perform predictive analysis are being developed, however, so automation squared is definitely in the cards.

This sort of automated information processing will also create additional value for the marketers who use the service. The results of testing in previous campaigns will compound the effectiveness of the prediction, and allow them to make decisions based on more accurate projections.

Problems we may not be able to solve: PR automation.

I don’t know if this will be a popular opinion, but chatbots are the absolute worst. Whenever I see a chatbot, I close it. In my group of peers automated chatbots are becoming one big joke. I get their usefulness in marketing, but it’s important to be careful. It isn’t a good idea to cross automation too far over into customer service and public relations. Whenever I get an automated service system when calling a service provider, I hammer “zero” like it’s an elevator button in a horror movie. I want to brute force the system to find me an agent to speak with.

This won’t be true for all people, and automated services definitely have their uses for simple, everyday inquiries to reduce workload. But one thing that automation can’t do, and may never be able to do, is de-escalation and conflict resolution.

One unfortunate side-effect of the proliferation of automated marketing technology is that consumers are becoming more sensitive to it. Usually, this isn’t a problem. But if you’re dealing with potentially irate group of consumers, a human touch is absolutely necessary.

Conflict resolution isn’t a skill we pick up in job training; it’s one of those soft skills that starts in childhood. Our upbringing from a very young age influences our emotional intelligence and our ability to handle adversarial situations with grace and aplomb. It’s a soft skill that we train for our entire lives, then train our kids for. It can certainly be honed by specific scripts and trained responses, but the skills are also driven by a sense of ethics and fair play that starts with learning to share toys.

My position here isn’t that automation is useless for PR, or that AI technology will never be able to handle conflict resolution. But there are some emergency circumstances in which automated services may exacerbate a public relations crisis. People want to feel heard, and as yet, no one really believes that a machine can listen.

Automation in marketing has an exciting future ahead. Taking advantage of it means looking for companies that are ahead of the curve when it comes to innovations in usability and predictive technology. You also need to pick your battles, apply automation with care and a decisive strategy, so that you don’t sacrifice consumer engagement and trust.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/whats-cards-marketing-automation.html/feed2Why B2B Marketers Should Turn Their White Papers Into Executive Briefshttps://blog.getresponse.com/turn-white-paper-executive-brief.html https://blog.getresponse.com/turn-white-paper-executive-brief.html#respondWed, 30 Aug 2017 16:28:34 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30645Content marketing is all about attracting the right audience by creating content that is relevant to them. The next step is to ensure that content reaches the audience – perhaps as part of an email marketing campaign, or on social media networks, for example. Content comes in lots of shapes and sizes In order […]

]]>Content marketing is all about attracting the right audience by creating content that is relevant to them. The next step is to ensure that content reaches the audience – perhaps as part of an email marketing campaign, or on social media networks, for example.

Content comes in lots of shapes and sizes

In order to effectively engage your prospects, you need to provide them with content in a variety of formats. As digital technology has evolved, so too has content. The days when publishing a blog post once in a while was sufficient have long gone. People want to see video, infographics and interactive content that speaks directly to them. Content serves many purposes:

Demonstrate thought leadership

Stimulate interest in your products and services

Educate and inform

Offer benefits to prospects by solving problems

But what if the point we are making represents a significant change in thinking or we want to demonstrate that we are ahead of the curve in our industry?

That’s where white papers come in handy. Rather than just glossing over a subject or quickly linking some ideas together with one or two references and some images, a white paper goes to the very heart of the matter in great detail.

White papers

A white paper will explore and examine ideas, present evidence and findings, and guide the reader through reason and argument in order to present a conclusion. The thinking should be thorough. Any quoted evidence must be transparent and compelling. The reasoning should be sound.

A well-put-together white paper achieves the following objectives:

Provides a quality asset that your prospects will value

Demonstrates thought leadership and expertise

Helps to change the thinking of your prospects

A white paper is not a sales pitch, although it may impress and entice readers towards your products and services. While it needs to be substantial and detailed, it cannot be boring or it won’t get read. That means using intelligent headings and subheadings, graphs, illustrations, infographics and tables throughout.

White paper drawbacks

While white papers are extremely powerful content marketing tools, there are some drawbacks:

They take time to create

It takes time to put together an effective white paper. It’s not “throwaway” content, as it were. Whatever points you are going to make need to be evidence-based. That means strong research. The structure, reasoning and presentation has to be just right. And it takes time to create the right infographics for the data presented, and of course for any other images you want to use.

A white paper will not be produced from scratch. The first document that is created is usually some kind of executive summary, which shows how the ideas are going to be presented and where. This is like a skeleton version that shows the structure, the ideas and the evidence – but still needs to be fleshed out.

They take time to read

When you offer a white paper to your audience, you are asking a lot of them. Of course, you ARE offering them a lot in return, but it takes time to read through a long white paper, even if it’s dynamite. If the document is too long, the people you are targeting with it may not be able to find the time to read it when you want them to, or in one sitting.

It may be time-sensitive

What if the subject matter or main thrust of your white paper goes out-of-date very quickly? You have to choose the subject matter very carefully and be sure about the long-term future and relevance of the document before starting.

Will it be wasted on parts of your target audience?

The more evidence you present, the more chance there is that people who otherwise understand and appreciate the general thrust of your argument will get lost or switch off. It’s just one of the risks you take with a white paper.

What will be the pay-off?

Is the subject matter too narrow? Is the subject matter too broad? Is the point being made compelling enough that it wins you significant interest, kudos or credibility? If you are going to invest the time and resources into creating a white paper, you will need to know in advance what the stakes are. You will need to know exactly who is going to want to read this, and why it is important to get your point(s) across.

These are just a few of the considerations that need to be at the forefront of the marketer’s mind before planning a white paper – though there is another question that is equally important.

Does it have to be a white paper?

Let’s clarify this. Let us imagine that we have already decided that the subject matter is much too important to skim over with a blog or an infographic. We want to produce something of business-critical importance that delivers impact. Maybe we need to be thinking about delivering an executive brief – i.e. a summary of the white paper that can be quickly and easily consumed.

Executive brief

Before a white paper can be created, an executive summary has to be produced. It includes all the main points and evidence that will be included in the white paper. It presents the argument in a simple and easy-to-follow way. It highlights the structure before the ideas are fully fleshed out.

With just a small amount of work, the executive summary can be amended into a finished, highly-condensed version of the white paper. By sticking to around 3 – 6 pages, the document will be much more compact, hard-hitting and easy to digest.

Admittedly, much of the hard work that goes into creating a white paper – planning the idea, carrying out or sourcing the research, producing infographics and establishing a structure – will still be necessary. However, you will still save time compared to creating a white paper.

Process (study that was carried out or the argument being made in more detail)

Findings and conclusions

Recommendations for action

The summary has a little more power than the introduction in a white paper. It is almost like a mini-version of the whole document. That’s brilliant, because if the recipient is not grabbed by what they are reading at that stage, they can put it down. If they are, they may well jump straight to the recommendations section and your work is done.

For those who want to see the evidence, they can read the rest of the document. The executive brief is more geared towards taking action than the white paper.

Turbocharge your white paper

To summarize, using white papers appropriately can yield great marketing benefits. That said, it takes time and energy, planning, and strategic thinking. There are some excellent reasons why producing more of an executive brief may be more effective:

Takes less time

Easier to digest

Accessibility – it is a simpler version

Has more punch – it’s more compact

Instant impact – the reader sees the point in the initial summary

Already part of the process of producing a white paper

Remember, if you are producing a white paper, you will have to produce some kind of executive summary as part of that process anyway. If your audience wants more later on, you can always expand on it. What really counts is that the content is useful, accurate and well-aimed at your audience.

What do you think about the idea of skipping the white paper and just going straight for the executive brief instead? Let us hear your thoughts in the comments below.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/turn-white-paper-executive-brief.html/feed0Why Spying on Competitors May Hurt Youhttps://blog.getresponse.com/spying-competitors-may-hurt.html https://blog.getresponse.com/spying-competitors-may-hurt.html#respondTue, 29 Aug 2017 15:31:40 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30633Once upon a time, someone somewhere told marketers they needed to know rivals inside out if wanted to succeed. Today their sons venerate traditions of predecessors, conducting a competitor analysis to step up their marketing campaigns. In other words, they spy. A proper competitor analysis allows to strengthen inbound marketing techniques for more traffic and […]

]]>Once upon a time, someone somewhere told marketers they needed to know rivals inside out if wanted to succeed. Today their sons venerate traditions of predecessors, conducting a competitor analysis to step up their marketing campaigns.

In other words, they spy.

A proper competitor analysis allows to strengthen inbound marketing techniques for more traffic and leads. Also, it helps to compete on content and link building strategies to overtake opponents online. Nothing is wrong with that, except the temptation to pocket their well-performing tactics and content ideas.

Risks and consequences are as clear as day:

Turning into another ‘me-too’ company.

Copyright abuse.

Accusations of plagiarism.

Google penalties.

That’s where a fine line goes between smart content marketing and plagiarism: you spy on competitors to not copy them but differentiate yourself. And that spying becomes unreasonable and far from innocent when you don’t understand how much is enough.

For those willing to fend off the pain a bad competitor analysis might cause, here go three don’ts to remember:

Don’t copy their content ideas.

To set a content strategy, you grab a list of competitors and start analyzing their content:

What content asset types they create and what formats work best.

Where they seed those assets.

How often they publish each content asset type.

Quality of their content.

Topics they cover, as well as social signals, backlinks, and SERP results they get.

And now, attention please.

What do you do with the most viral topic ideas from your competitors? In the brave new world, you would take that content crowd and create something new. But unfortunately (or not?), we don’t live in the perfect world. And big chances are, you decide to borrow some of their ideas for your content plan.

This tactic has no luck a priori.

Everyone borrows one way or another. You refer to sources, cite influencers, or learn how to properly paraphrase predecessors. But it’s perspective and individual experience what makes your content original. So, addressing a topic based on competitors’ strengths turns you into a copy-cat in the audiences’ eyes.

Ways to combat this:

Attack their weaknesses by addressing the topics they don’t cover. It will allow you to attract the audiences they miss.

Think of your strengths overplaying the competitors’, and focus on them in your content.

To avoid unintentional plagiarism in your content plan, consider a content matrix. It helps to brainstorm ‘like a boss’ and come up with original content ideas for marketing campaigns.

Don’t plagiarize their writing style.

When spying on competitors, you read and analyze tons of their content assets. As a marketer, you need the information on their content accuracy, depth, structure, length, and tone. More than that, you need to know who writes their content, where (and if) they guest blog, and what their areas of expertise are.

And it’s that very moment when you should fight the temptation of following their writing style.

Your audience doesn’t need a copy. To turn readers into leads and avoid accusations of plagiarism, make sure your brand has voice and tone. You should decide on the consistent terminology to use in texts, a surplus value of your content, and power words to use so people might feel a certain way about your message.

To get heard, you can’t re-write and copy others all the time or raise your voice. Instead, you need to set yourself apart and show the audience that you have something special to say.

Don’t copy keywords and donors they use for link building.

You keep track of competitors’ SEO to spy on keywords they are ranking for, as well as donors they use to get backlinks. You can legally steal some of those donors whenever appropriate:

They are relevant to your niche.

They link to more than one competitor of yours.

They post high-quality content and can give your traffic.

Your target audience is there.

You have resources to reach them.

But, for the sake of marketing gods, don’t steal ALL keywords and donors simply because competitors use them. It leads to nothing but thief of time and money, as well as Google penalties for link spam. You need to personalize the process to fit with your brand voice and product or service.

How to do that?

Rather than copying the keywords your competitors have won the SERP for, consider ranking for those they ignored. Rather than replicating the links of your competitors, get new ones they don’t have, and do that at a faster rate. This approach allows you to avoid unintentional plagiarism in your link building campaign.

In a word…

Too much water drowned the miller, so keep a balance.

Spying on competitors and following their steps should be just a part of your long-term marketing strategy. Analyze them to create own unique campaigns that set your brand apart, reflect its identity, and help it climb to the top of Google. Your purpose is to overtake competitors, not simply catch up with them, isn’t it?

Related posts

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/spying-competitors-may-hurt.html/feed0Minimalism in Email Marketing: An Ello Storyhttps://blog.getresponse.com/minimalism-in-email-marketing.html https://blog.getresponse.com/minimalism-in-email-marketing.html#commentsMon, 28 Aug 2017 19:44:57 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30623Unless you’re an artsy marketer, who spends his free time doing DIY Pinterest projects or catching up on the latest in art, design, or culture, you may not care for Ello. This social media phenomenon became every artist’s mecca once all the curious “normal” people forgot their passwords. So, why does a marketing blog bring […]

]]>Unless you’re an artsy marketer, who spends his free time doing DIY Pinterest projects or catching up on the latest in art, design, or culture, you may not care for Ello. This social media phenomenon became every artist’s mecca once all the curious “normal” people forgot their passwords.

So, why does a marketing blog bring up such a hipster creative network website? Not because you can market on it (well, you might be able to, but that’s material for another post), but because Ello ROCKS at email marketing. From simple product updates to GIF and emoji filled emails, Ello deserves a shout out for making minimalism relevant in email marketing.

These rules aren’t there just to please all the design and minimalism followers, they are there because 54% of sent emails are now open on mobile devices – and that number is rising! Mobile devices are increasing, emails sent are increasing, and our attention span is also reaching going from 7 seconds to 11. Why am I mentioning the 7 to 11 statistic? Because as a marketer you need to grasp just how much time you have to convey your message – 11 seconds! Which is why it’s time you pump up your design skills and take a note from Ello’s crisp and to-the-point email marketing.

Product Updates

This is one of the most important emails we as marketers tend to send. Sometimes a product update can be the fine line between gaining or keeping a customer and losing someone’s interest.

Over the years I’ve received numerous product updates:

Plain text

An image and a link that takes me to a news update

A giant button prompting me to go take a look at an updated website

An email with a blog post link telling me something changed

What all of these lacked was a quick and preferably visually provoking update that doesn’t force the customer into clicking too much, figuring out too much, or maybe even forget that something changed.

Here are three examples of great Ello product update emails (in full disclosure, they are not screenshots of the entire emails as Ello is the king of long haul emails!):

Copywriting that grabs your attention

As you may have already noticed, Ello has a specific copywriting style, moreover, it is a consistent style. The best thing you can do for your emails is to have a set of rules for your writing – from how you address your audience down to grammar rules you want to abide by.

If you know your customer personas you know exactly what speaks to them, take advantage of that knowledge and send them copy that they can relate to. Ello is a community full of artists, designers, and connoisseurs of good taste, their copy reflects that cool, chill vibe:

Being part of your community

The only way to increase your contacts list is by making sure there is value to it. Every email marketing expert will tell you that list hygiene is the way to go, it is better to lose 37 crappy contacts that refuse to acknowledge your emails, and in turn – your business, but gain 17 awesome contacts that engage with your business, help you step up your game, and finally – that buy into whatever you’re selling.

What does engagement look like and what are the benefits of it? It’s pretty easy, actually.

Feedback and Survey emails

You may not always hear what you’d like but there is no better way to increase your CTR and ROI than with some honest thoughts from the very users you are trying to entice into buying. Your business is, after all, for your customers and the best way to get that across is by working with them.

As with everything Ello does – there is no hidden agenda, no marketing slogans and numerous banners taking away from the key message – do you like the emails you’re receiving?:

Another favorite minimalistic (meaning clear and simple) approach I love about Ello is the sheer honesty. We’re thinking of working on a project, we’d love to know if it really is relevant to you, our customer:

Case studies and Testimonials

An incredible amount of businesses produce case studies and testimonials that are posted on their website and left for people to find. Why not wrap that content in an easily digestible email that will reach every customer and prospect alike?

Ello did an excellent job of including their community in their emails. It was not really a case study and probably not a testimonial, but it was a great way to share what they do – for artists by artists to expand artistry (triple-a if you will). Check out their fab interview emails:

These were a great read to receive in my inbox. Tired of slogans, banners, screaming promotions, and endless overstuffed emails it was refreshing to just receive content. Pure and simple, a way for me to bond with Ello and look forward to their emails!

Including your customers

This might be a very niche thing to do, but Ello did an incredible job of engaging their community by asking them to be part of their team! Sure, you may not be able to hire your customers (Or can you?) but they can be a huge asset in showing prospects and customers that you are open to working with them to create a product that they want beyond the usual survey and feedback research.

Ello send a beautifully simple and easy email asking their community if they’d like to be a guest-editor. They send a very clear message about their values – we are a community FOR a community. I love that there are no marketing words, no hidden clauses, and besides the essentials there are no links to various places.

Bullet points, dates, bold text, and a VERY clear CTA button, what’s not to love?

Blank canvas

I have to admit, I have not logged into my Ello account a very, very long time but I still keep my account around to make sure I receive their email updates. The simplicity of each email and the incredible content curation is not just pleasing to me as someone who loves art and design, it is also an inspiration as a digital marketer, email campaign sender, and content curator.

Every campaign, message, and sale can be sent without the need to overwhelm. If every email we sent was this clear, positive, and mobile-friendly we’d build an empire of awesomeness like Ello!

What do you think of minimalism in email marketing? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/minimalism-in-email-marketing.html/feed1ResponseCon 2017: Speakershttps://blog.getresponse.com/responsecon-2017-speakers.html https://blog.getresponse.com/responsecon-2017-speakers.html#respondFri, 25 Aug 2017 00:42:16 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30583If you’ve been reading our blog, you know we have a very big event coming up in October. Four of them, actually. GetResponse is hitting the road and will be visiting Boston, Denver, San Diego, and Austin, Texas. We are very excited about this! Registration is open, so do start the process of getting your tickets […]

]]>If you’ve been reading our blog, you know we have a very big event coming up in October. Four of them, actually. GetResponse is hitting the road and will be visiting Boston, Denver, San Diego, and Austin, Texas. We are very excited about this!

Registration is open, so do start the process of getting your tickets purchased. Early bird pricing starts at $99.

ResponseCon is more than just an opportunity to learn through roundtable discussions or a certification program. You also get the chance to hear some of the brightest minds in marketing speak. Let’s break down who you can meet, and what they’ll speak on at ResponseCon:

Simon Grabowski, CEO of GetResponse and Mike Morris, Head of GetResponse US

Simon and Mike will share some of GetResponse’s history, and its future. Did you know the company is nearly 20 years old, and Simon created the first version of the GetResponse software as a young man in his attic? We’ve come a long way, baby, from that simple autoresponder tool. Now we’re a comprehensive online marketing tool with a mix of features you can’t in one place anywhere else… and we’re still looking to change the face of online marketing for small and medium businesses. You’ll hear about our plans and goals for the future from Simon and Mike.

Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group

Michael will talk about championing the ideas that bring the most impact to your organization. He’ll show you how to focus on business outcomes and how to act like a leader – not to focus on tasks. Learn the tricks to push back on things that don’t work, so you can work more effectively. And finally, attendees will have a framework to take away to help the organization come together around your most innovative ideas.

Andrew Davis, CEO of Monumental Shift

Andrew will discuss the benefits of customer loyalty, and how to use it to build your existing business even bigger. He calls it the “loyalty loop.” He will help you understand the new customer experience – and how to do things like build anticipation, take advantage of a customer “honeymoon” period, and drive inspirational moments with a company that drive additional business.

Jamie Turner, CEO of 60 Second Marketer

Jamie is going to teach attendees how to re-think one of the old standbys of marketing: the customer journey. He will give a lesson on “thinking backwards” in order to increase your campaign ROI, will share consumer behavior secrets that will help you with your campaign performance, and will teach how to lay your campaigns’ foundation properly for a strong marketing campaign.

In addition to serving as one of our keynote speakers, Jamie will serve as the host for each event.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/responsecon-2017-speakers.html/feed05 Useful Tools to Hack Your Social Media Growthhttps://blog.getresponse.com/growth-hacking-social-media.html https://blog.getresponse.com/growth-hacking-social-media.html#commentsWed, 23 Aug 2017 20:36:46 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30567Growth hacking is all the rage nowadays, and with good reason. With the growing demand to generate sales for your online business, not to mention the cutthroat competition that you are up against, you are forced to use everything in your power to make it happen. However, unless you have unlimited funds to spend on […]

]]>Growth hacking is all the rage nowadays, and with good reason. With the growing demand to generate sales for your online business, not to mention the cutthroat competition that you are up against, you are forced to use everything in your power to make it happen. However, unless you have unlimited funds to spend on paid campaigns to promote your business to your audience, you are already working at a disadvantage.

This problem prevails on social media. Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, to name a few, are gold mines for potential leads and clients. However, you have to filter for millions of users to find the right people to convert into rabid followers, if not return customers.

Obviously, you can’t just walk in blind on each social media and randomly post messages and follow people. You need to devise a strategy that will allow you to squeeze the most out of your campaigns and catch up with others in the rat race. As mentioned, you are going up against businesses with years of experience and authority ahead of you. Therefore, you need to implement growth hacking principles to your social media marketing so you can generate better results from your implementation.

What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking is an approach that allows you to maximize your marketing efforts and produce results as a Fortune 500 brand would.

The difference is that you don’t need to burn a hole in your pocket to achieve the same level of success. This method is perfect for startups who want a leg up in the competition, so they don’t have to start from scratch. Growth hacking lets you build brand equity quickly and leverage it to increase web traffic, leads, and sales.

Regarding growth hacking in social media, we can break them down using the following metrics:

Content – Using your brand persona, you need to develop and publish content on your social media to help

Engagement – Generating more likes, comments, and shares on your social media posts help increase your visibility on social media.

Followers – To drive more engagement on your social media, you need to find a way to rake in highly qualified followers that will be more than happy to interact with your content.

Conversion – Being followers may not be enough. You need to find a way to mobilize them into becoming clients and customers.

Using these KPIs for your social media marketing, in this post are tools that will help you not only reach these goals but reach them fast.

But first..

A word about growth hacking

Before we start introducing the different social media tools, you need to be aware of the major pitfall of growth hacking.

As with most marketing tactics, growth hacking will not produce pleasant results for your business if used the wrong way. The advantage of growth hacking is its ability to automate mundane tasks so you can get more things done in less time. However, some people rely too much on the automation part to run their business. As a result, your business loses its human touch that is essential is connecting with your audience. Personalization is key if you want to reach your social media goals that will help the bottom line of your business.

While I will be featuring growth hacking tools that have automation features, you need to practice discretion and moderation when using them. Always balance out the automation part with your human touch to round out your social media marketing.

Without further ado, below are social media growth hacking tools that you should incorporate in your marketing.

When you’re a public figure, you can expect to garner hundreds and thousands of Twitter and Instagram followers in days. However, your work is cut out for you as a brand. You need to get people on board as followers using different tactics actively. Some will be effective, but if only there’s a way to boost your efforts on Twitter and Instagram marketing techniques that work.

Thankfully, your prayers have been answered in the form Crowdfire. The tool helps organize your Twitter tasks by showing your fans and non-followers, as well as recent and inactive followers on both platforms. Using this information, you can follow your fans and recent followers and cut ties with non-followers and inactive ones. Doing so allows you to trim the fat from your follower and following list, which could lead to better engagement.

Also, Crowdfire lets you send auto-DMs to people who initially follow you. While this practice is rife for misuse, it nonetheless lets you come up with creative ways to put your foot in the door with your followers about your business.

Sharing content using social media, whether it’s yours or someone else’s, allows you to provide useful information to your followers. However, it doesn’t have to end in sharing the content for your brand to benefit.

Using Poplink, you can embed a “poplink”, which is an attention-grabbing box that slides up the screen with your CTA in it, to each post you share. Whether it’s to get more people to follow you on social media, grow your email list, or point them to your landing pages, you can do it using this tool. Doing so lets your social media content not only share relevant content to your audience but also squeeze more people to visit your site or become a social media follower.

Curating content on social media is crucial if you want to connect with publishers in your field, aside from offer useful content that resonates with your followers. However, you may not have the time to research and handpick each content that goes out to your social network.

Quuu proves to be your turnkey solution to all your content curation problems on social media. By subscribing to any of its paid plans, the tool will find the most relevant content based on your chosen interests. You can decide to automatically publish the content on your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn accounts using Buffer or manually sift through the suggestions and choose the best ones for publishing.

Even if you are using a social media publishing tool that lets you schedule your posts, they can only publish content during a specific timeframe. It would be better if there’s a tool that lets you create a campaign for your blog posts to be shared within a year.

MissingLettr does exactly that – create a set-and-forget social campaign for your blog posts. Instead of rescheduling your content time and again in a year using other tools, MissingLettr lets you schedule the images and content to be featured on each post in a matter of minutes.

The best thing about the tool is that it automatically generates image and content suggestions for you to choose and use for each message. You don’t have to create images from scratch as the tool with doing that for you! If you’re not satisfied with the suggestions, you can edit each to suit your needs before launching the year-long social media campaign.

Pinterest is a great source of sales to your business, especially as an online seller. However, despite pinning awesome visual content on this social channel, it won’t mean much if you don’t have followers to influence into becoming customers. Therefore, you need to find an effective way to grow your follower and what better way to do that using PinPinterest.

You can set the tool to auto-pilot as it lets you perform various actions using different triggers to benefit your online business. PinPinterest is powerful enough to help you schedule pins on boards you participate in, automatically pin content from your website on the most relevant boards, and follow influencers in your field of interests endlessly with just a click of a button, to name a few of its features.

Running a blog on top of your online business is a necessary, albeit a complicated process. It’s one thing to create and set up your blog – it’s another to drive traffic and get the well-deserved traffic for the posts you’ve worked hours to write.

Promoting your blog content on social media is a good place to start in generating traffic. However, aside from using MissingLettr to promote your posts, it may not be enough to drive a substantial amount of traffic to convert them into leads. A possible issue that may contribute to this problem is that you don’t have enough followers to share your content to. Even if you keep promoting on your social media accounts, you are simply spreading your message in an empty hall.

To combat this issue, you need help from people related to your industry to share your content with you. With Quuu Promote, your content will be promoted by influencers with hundreds of followers who will get to read your post. From there, assuming that they are impressed with your article, they will visit your site for more information or become a new social media follower.

Conclusion

From the tools above, you can see why people are gravitating towards running their social media campaigns will growth hacking in mind. Not only do the tools maximize the efforts of their current strategies, but it also lets them automate some of the menial tasks involved in social media marketing and free up time to focus on growing their business.

However, as mentioned earlier, you need to use the tools above within reasons. While it is a convenience to automate everything, it loses the human touch necessary in building relationships with people that lead to sales. If anything, the tools above should complement your existing social media marketing campaign and boost your efforts for better results.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/growth-hacking-social-media.html/feed15 Tips to Improve Search Traffic Through Email Marketinghttps://blog.getresponse.com/improve-search-traffic-email-marketing.html https://blog.getresponse.com/improve-search-traffic-email-marketing.html#respondTue, 22 Aug 2017 16:23:20 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30551Email marketing can drive remarkable results for your SEO campaigns. Email marketing can be really good for your SEO and thus reflects in an improvement of search traffic to your website. There is no obvious connection between email and SEO because Google isn’t likely to crawl emails to rank your website. Also, having a lot […]

]]>Email marketing can drive remarkable results for your SEO campaigns. Email marketing can be really good for your SEO and thus reflects in an improvement of search traffic to your website. There is no obvious connection between email and SEO because Google isn’t likely to crawl emails to rank your website. Also, having a lot of subscribers doesn’t make you a Google favorite.

Still, it can be confidently said that email marketing is useful for keeping your target audience engaged with your company and thus generating traffic in a way that you can never get through any other method. If you do email marketing well, the results can be highly beneficial for your website ranking.

Let’s look at the best strategies to drive traffic and improve your SEO campaigns.

1. Encourage email engagement

Your email should always have a focus and a way to interact with the recipients. Sending many emails is not the key but sending a resourceful one is definitely going to be better for actual subscriber engagement and website traffic. The successful marketing campaign will definitely attract users to use your website or services.

If you have written some great content about marketing for social media channels, then you can use that content by sending it out to your subscribers or target audience that you think would be interested in reading it. Once you hit the right audience, they will check your blog, and that will add up to a number of views and shares, thus improving ranking and thus reflecting positively on your SEO campaigns.

This can be even enhanced by including an engagement call to action within your email:

Encourage users to leave comments in the comment section of your blog and inspire them to tell you what benefits they have from you.

You can also refer to a nonprofit that you support and thus encourage users to share the post. It’s a win-win situation.

You can also encourage people to interact with you on social media by providing your social links in the email.

2. Encourage website subscribers

As engagement can be enhanced by encouraging users to comment on your posts, but there should be another way of interacting with your company. Instead of relying on simple emails, you should encourage users to subscribe your website. This would help in more user engagement over time.

There are few methods to do so, let’s see which those are:

When you provide a link to your work in email, you should also make it clear enough that RSS is the way to stay connected with you.

You can likewise ask users to subscribe to your social media platforms in order to stay connected.

3. Create a newsletter sign-up series

This can go a long way towards generating leads and increasing your website traffic, as well as rapidly increasing your subscribers. You should give your subscribers a proper place to signup and then verify their email address to assure the authentication process. Afterward you should decide on the length of your series.

The series should be good enough to go for 7-14 days with divided content. You can also offer professional translation option for users who don’t understand your primary language. But, the final day should include links to trial, demo or subscription which will automatically turn your new subscribers into buyers.

4. Add a sign-up app

This is great for marketing and adding into your users but if you can’t build your own app, you can run to Facebook for taking care of it. The timeline feature of Facebook offers a lot of features for building apps and they range from email signup form to different pages. It is also very easy to use and understand. You can also apply customization options for your brand and give it the right look and feel, consistent with your brand.

And if you are on WordPress, you can make use of several list building plugins for your blog that will help you build list effortlessly.

5. Offer a free subscription

Another amazing way to get users to become your subscribers is by offering free subscriptions to your product, newsletter, and blog. This will not only increase your website traffic but will be great for your SEO too.

People in general love free stuff, so it is a great way to attract users by offering something that users will find useful.

In conclusion

Email marketing and SEO, by normal measures, don’t work together hand-in-hand. But if you think outside the box a little bit, you can see where they are great complements, and how successful email marketing can also benefit your search traffic. Have you tried any of the tips and tricks mentioned in this blog post? How did they work for you? Share your experiences in the comments below.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/improve-search-traffic-email-marketing.html/feed0How to Avoid the 6 Biggest Pitfalls of Lead Nurturinghttps://blog.getresponse.com/avoid-6-biggest-pitfalls-lead-nurturing.html https://blog.getresponse.com/avoid-6-biggest-pitfalls-lead-nurturing.html#respondMon, 21 Aug 2017 21:22:43 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30544Lead nurturing doesn’t have to be complicated. Learn how to steer clear of these common mistakes by adhering to common sense lead nurturing strategies. 1. Make your emails sound personal to avoid being confused with a bot. Most contemporary B2B buyers can spot an impersonal, automated sales email from a mile away. They have had […]

]]>Lead nurturing doesn’t have to be complicated. Learn how to steer clear of these common mistakes by adhering to common sense lead nurturing strategies.

1. Make your emails sound personal to avoid being confused with a bot.

Most contemporary B2B buyers can spot an impersonal, automated sales email from a mile away. They have had years of experience receiving poorly-written campaigns that bear little resemblance to actual human speech patterns.

But the incentives are still there for companies to rely on these tactics. They’re simple, fast, inexpensive, and occasionally successful.

It’s obvious that you have to use email in order to reach your prospects, so how can you avoid falling into the trap of the robotic salesperson? The answer is easy, in theory, yet requires some persistence in execution. Make sure your emails sound like they were written by a human being. Personalize them with the data you have collected, avoid using industry jargon, and read them back a few times before sending.

2. Follow up quickly and consistently so you don’t miss opportunities.

In sales, there are certain things that are always going to be out of your control. You can’t control your prospects’ pain points. You can’t just eliminate decision makers so that you only have to deal with a single person.

It’s crucial to let go of these factors. Instead, focus on what you can do. And one thing you have complete control over is whether or not you respond to every lead, and how quickly you do so.

Despite this fact, it’s still astonishing to read how many salespeople fail to respond to leads in a timely manner. A landmark study by the Harvard Business Review that involved over 2,000 companies found that the average online lead response time was 42 hours.

Companies that think it’s okay to wait nearly two full days to respond to a lead are making a costly mistake. All you have to do to be different from them is to closely monitor your lead response tracking, and hold your sales team to a higher standard.

3. Focus on what your prospects need, not what your product does.

One simple truth could be repeated in every publication in the world, and some sales professionals still wouldn’t get it:

Your prospects only care about your product in so far as it makes their lives easier!

Outside of this consideration, it doesn’t matter to them how incredibly innovative your software development process is, or how your company was the first to perfect a certain feature. So there isn’t any reason to talk about these things unless you can relate them directly to the client’s needs every single time.

It’s easy to see why sales reps are so eager to talk about product features, and in some ways the sentiment is admirable. They have a product they believe in, and they want to share this value with their clients. But the consensus is clear: selling product features doesn’t work. Instead, use your lead nurturing campaign to encourage your prospect to explain in detail how you can help them.

4. Understand that your prospects are unique, and take the time to get to know them.

One of the worst habits exhibited by well-meaning salespeople during lead nurturing is assuming that they know everything about a client’s business because they’ve sold to similar companies in the past. But “similar” is not synonymous with “identical.”

Each prospect is in a unique situation. Each one of them has a specific set of responsibilities, expectations, limitations, and capabilities that are their own. Even in circumstances where there are similarities, you have to avoid talking to your prospect as if you already know what they need. It sounds condescending, and you certainly never want to come off that way in any professional interaction.

Your client is the expert on their company, not you. Do your research, use the data you gather to form a base of knowledge, and then take the opportunity to learn directly from the expert. You might be surprised at how much your prospect reveals when you give them the chance to talk to you.

Some companies think that merely instituting a data gathering operation is enough. Rest assured that it isn’t. When data isn’t managed and applied correctly, it’s nothing but a resource drain.

What turns data into a powerful tool, however, is when it is integrated throughout the company. All teams must be committed to upholding its quality. Then, it can provide an accurate and holistic view of the prospect’s sales journey in general, and the lead qualification process specifically.

6. Don’t assume any outcomes. Listen to what your data tell you.

Once again, your data is only as powerful as you allow it to be. Far too many sales teams have lead nurturing performance metrics in place, yet dismiss the results based on a feeling.

If your results tell you that prospect engagement is suffering because of lead response times, then institute a policy for quicker responses. If your content marketing isn’t delivering the desired results, ditch it and develop new content. These metrics are in place for specific reasons. Don’t ignore them because you are married to a specific strategy.

These are some of the most common lead nurturing mistakes that you need to watch out for, but there are certainly others. Everyone in sales has been guilty of one or another from time to time, but vigilance is the antidote to repetition. Lead nurturing is all about demonstrating to your clients that you are committed to adding value to their experience. As long as you focus on that core principle, then your actions will reflect it accordingly.

What other lead nurturing pitfalls have you noticed that you or other sales professionals have fallen victim to?

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/avoid-6-biggest-pitfalls-lead-nurturing.html/feed0Match Your Message to Your Market on Social Mediahttps://blog.getresponse.com/match-message-market.html https://blog.getresponse.com/match-message-market.html#respondThu, 17 Aug 2017 16:15:18 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30527You may have a great message, but is it reaching the right people? Creating a great message is important. Making sure it gets to the right people, in the right way, on the platform where their attention already is, is critical. Demographics and personas. The first thing you need to get a solid grasp on […]

]]>You may have a great message, but is it reaching the right people? Creating a great message is important. Making sure it gets to the right people, in the right way, on the platform where their attention already is, is critical.

Demographics and personas.

The first thing you need to get a solid grasp on is your audience (not in any way that will get you in trouble with HR). You need to really know and understand who your audience is. Hopefully, you already do. Ideally, you will have a wealth of background information and statistics, used them to work out personas and backed up your findings with a lot of analytical data. Then again, you may be at the start of the process and need to do all those things.

Personas are important in the creative process of getting a clear idea of the message that you need to write to match your market. A persona is a representative of your market. If you are marketing a new chocolate bar, you might imagine that your persona is a male child aged 13, who is a big fan of Boruto and is easily distracted. It’s a way to put a face on a 10- to 15-year-old predominantly male demographic. It also doesn’t tell the whole story.

Products and services may have a demographic that is more important than others, but a single persona does not represent your market place. A chocolate bar may appeal to young boys, but it will also appeal to young girls. It will also appeal to older men and women. Everyone loves chocolate. Young boys may account for 60% of the market, but that doesn’t mean you want to ignore the other 40%.

That’s why it’s useful to think of multiple demographics, and work up multiple personas. Where a young boy might care about action and excitement, a young girl might care about sharing. The older consumers, who are probably going to be the people who pay for it anyway, will have another set of concerns. They may be worried about the amount of sugar and fat in the bar, or if the products used in its manufacture are ethically sourced.

Put those together and make an ad where a team of ninja robots decide to learn a lesson about sharing and the importance of ethically sourced cocoa and milk, and you’ll get a mess (or a message that’s interesting for the wrong reasons). It’s better to work out what the different focuses of your entire audience are, and then work out different ways to get a message to those key markets.

Split testing is your friend.

One of the benefits of getting your message out on social media is the ability to test and change your approach continually. When you have settled on a persona and a focus for your message, there can still be different ways to realize it. Let’s take our chocolate bar and imagine that we are creating copy to appeal to our young female audience with a focus on sharing. Here are a couple of ways it could go:

Jenny thought she didn’t have any friends. All it took was Petra to share her Hazleblast bar and it made her day!

Both are legitimate approaches. The first takes a more humorous approach and the second plays on emotions. Both target the 10- to 15-year-old female demographic and show the benefits of sharing the product. Which one is best? In fact, either of them could be the most effective. The only real way to find out is to split test them.

Let’s take Facebook as an example. You can create two ads, which are exactly the same apart from the copy. You can set the split at 50/50 or whatever you like. Then you send your two ads out. Then you see which one has been the most successful. You can then test it against other copy if you have more ideas, or even change up the image, your call to action or even if you include emoji or not.

Through split testing, you can see your message evolve so it is the most effective at reaching your market. You are carrying out market research while you are growing brand awareness (or even selling your product).

Jumping from platform to platform.

Once you have defined the different areas of your audience, and split tested to find the best way to deliver that message to them – you still need to think about where you will reach them. You need to reach your audience where there attention already is, and on the device that captures that attention.

The younger audience is a good example here. Facebook doesn’t let people have their own accounts until the age of 13. So, while the split testing ad may have worked out well for the 13 to 15 year olds glued to social media, it still ignores a key part of that demographic. Although you would still want to advertise on Facebook, it might be worthwhile to extend out to websites or even in-app advertisements, because that’s where that particular audience’s attention actually is.

On a basic level – you need to think about how your message will appear on different devices. The copy on a desktop Facebook ad may take up more space than is available in an in-app ad. You always need to be aware of how your message will appear on a mobile phone, even if you’re creating the ad on a desktop computer. Whatever device your message is being read on, you need to make sure that it is clear to read, clear to understand and has a clear purpose.

The medium is the message.

There are a variety of ways you can deliver your message. It will always be accompanied by copy – but it could be a picture, a GIF, a slideshow, a video, a livestream, a 360 video, an interactive form… even through a game. When considering what medium to use to put out a message, you need to ask: (a) does it effectively represent my brand and (b) will it entertain my audience?

There may be evidence that people in the 12 to 15-year-old demographic may really respond and interact with live-streams, but unless there is a real way that a live stream can support your message and demonstrate the value of your product, then it’s better to choose a medium that works. A picture of two friends laughing a sharing a chocolate bar may be more effective than seeing how long it will take a Hazelblast bar to melt in the sun.

Once you’ve hit your target: retarget!

The last thing to think about in getting your message to the market is to consider what interaction they have had with your company before. People who have already interacted with your advertising, or visited the website don’t want to be given the same message over and over again. Not only can this lead to ad fatigue, it’s also easier to convert people who have already come part of the way along the sales journey.

Retargeting is a very powerful tool. Using things like the Facebook Pixel, you can automatically track the audience interaction. You can then set up a copy sequence, so that the audience can be retargeted with a message designed to push them along to the next level of your sales funnel. By honing your message to respond to their level of experience, you have a better chance of converting them.

Match your message to find your match.

People go on the Internet for two reasons: to have a problem solved or to be entertained. By matching your message to a persona, honing that message through split testing, placing that message on the right device and matching your message to their level of experience – you have a greater chance of them engaging with their message. They are more likely to be entertained as you are speaking directly to them, rather than to just anyone. Ultimately, you are more likely to solve their problem – whether it’s choosing a new chocolate bar or a new life insurance provider.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/match-message-market.html/feed0How to Use Content to Improve Customer Lifetime Valuehttps://blog.getresponse.com/content-improve-customer-lifetime-value.html https://blog.getresponse.com/content-improve-customer-lifetime-value.html#respondWed, 16 Aug 2017 15:52:42 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30513It’s well-documented that it’s both easier and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than it is to a new one. Indeed, according to Gartner, “65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, and it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one satisfied.” Paul Farris […]

]]>It’s well-documented that it’s both easier and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than it is to a new one. Indeed, according to Gartner, “65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, and it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one satisfied.”

Paul Farris et al’s book Marketing Metrics agrees, revealing that there is a 60-70% chance of a repeat customer converting.

With this in mind it of course makes sense for companies to concentrate just as much (if not a little more) on keeping their existing customers happy as they do on acquiring new ones.

And so indeed the challenge is set – improve customer lifetime value.

The question, however, is how?

The hourglass sales funnel

As marketers, we of course all use content to land new business. However, what fewer of us do is use content marketing to retain existing customers.

This is a shame, because great content is one of a company’s strongest assets at all stages of the sales funnel – from building brand awareness to driving traffic, and from generating leads to mobilizing promoters.

Indeed, the folks over at Content Harmony have even created a new version of the sales funnel to illustrate the point. They believe that the sales funnel should not be shaped like a funnel at all – more like an hourglass that widens again after conversion.

This model indeed makes sense. Far too many companies focus entirely on landing new business – but then, once a sale has been made, completely forget that those customers should be targeted for more sales.

What we need is to find a way to build loyalty, and if we were to use an hourglass funnel, then indeed we would be better at using content marketing to improve customer lifetime value.

So let’s now consider a few tactics that we can draw upon to start using some of our strongest content marketing techniques to improve our customer retention rates.

How to use content to improve customer lifetime value

Guides and tutorials

If you want to keep engagement levels high amongst your existing customers, then you need to work out what their pain points are, and then produce content that aims to solve them.

A great way to do this is through producing guides and tutorials for how to get the most out of the product(s) or service(s) that you are selling.

Your website’s blog, of course, is a great place to start in this regard. But by no means should it be the end of your efforts. In many cases, a great video tutorial can be the perfect and most accessible way to communicate some of the more intricate aspects of what your solution does.

For instance, here’s a short video from graphic-design tool website Canva, showing users very quickly how to start getting to grips with the site’s features and functions. Note that it’s useful for those who are already using Canva, and helps these users get the most out of the product, thusly mitigating the risk that they might switch allegiance to an alternative.

Email marketing

Your customers will naturally now be on your email marketing list – so don’t forget about them.

To start with, use your email campaigns to reach existing customers with exclusive offers and special loyalty discounts – this is great way to reward your valued customers and succeed in retaining them.

But don’t stop there. Emails are also great for fielding questionnaires and surveys, and for asking your customers if there is anything that you could do to improve your service.

Exclusive and gated content

A good content marketing strategy that has the explicit aim of improving customer lifetime value should include the production of content that is designed exclusively for your loyal customers.

This, indeed, should be your high-end output, offering real, in-depth analysis or industry reports that are the sole reserve of those that do business with you.

Offering this type of exclusivity adds real value to the prospect of continuing to do business with you. It’s also a great way to make customers feel special and valued themselves.

Remind customers of the benefits of doing business with you

Yes, this is really important, and another great use of email marketing.

Naturally, your business solves some sort of problem for your customers, and indeed this where your true value lies. So, send out weekly reminders of what you’re doing for them.

For example, if your business consists of a money-saving app, then use email to periodically remind customers of how much money your solution is actually saving them every week (or month or what have you). Indeed, no matter what product or service you are selling, you should remind customers (if it’s applicable) of how much money they are saving by staying with you compared to straying to competitors.

Another example might be if you had a fitness app – weekly reminders of how much your users’ health is improving is a great way to make sure they keep in mind the value your product is bringing to their lives. And while you’re at it, you could send them some healthy recipe suggestions, too!

Back to you

With so much revenue coming from returning customers, it’s essential that you focus on them. Improving customer lifetime value is the way to long-term growth, and content marketing can be used in all sorts of ways to help you achieve these goals.

What other content marketing tactics have you got up your sleeve to help improve customer lifetime value? Let us know in the comments below.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/content-improve-customer-lifetime-value.html/feed0ResponseCon Registration Opens Tomorrowhttps://blog.getresponse.com/responsecon-registration-opens-tomorrow.html https://blog.getresponse.com/responsecon-registration-opens-tomorrow.html#respondTue, 15 Aug 2017 18:39:22 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30504It’s nearly here! Registration for ResponseCon opens tomorrow (August 16, 2017)! Four two-day events in four cities across America make for great inspiration, learning, and networking. October 17-18, join us in Boston. October 19-20, come see us in Denver. October 23-24, visit us in San Diego. October 25-26, meet up with us in Austin. All […]

]]>It’s nearly here! Registration for ResponseCon opens tomorrow (August 16, 2017)! Four two-day events in four cities across America make for great inspiration, learning, and networking.

October 17-18, join us in Boston.

October 19-20, come see us in Denver.

October 23-24, visit us in San Diego.

October 25-26, meet up with us in Austin.

All four events will feature the opportunities to learn from GetResponse experts and to become certified partners – giving you a way to earn more money with us and grow your business.

You’ll also have the chance to hear such marketing influencers such as Jamie Turner, Michael Brenner, and Andrew Davis.

Plus, get inspired by hearing how you can apply some of the successes from our customers to your own business. The people behind some of our case studies will be present as well, and you’ll be able to talk with them.

Early bird tickets will be available. Each ticket includes access to the full conference: keynote presentations, roundtable discussions, educational sessions, case studies, and panel discussions. Plus, networking opportunities with some of the top industry professionals and your peers. Also included in the ticket price are lunch, snacks, and soft drinks – sustenance is important to help your brain stay focused!

Call your boss, get budgetary approval – do what you have to do. Tickets are limited, and you don’t want to miss out on being one of the first attendees of ResponseCon.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/responsecon-registration-opens-tomorrow.html/feed04 Tips to Help Writers and Content Marketers Boost Their Productivityhttps://blog.getresponse.com/tips-writers-boost-productivity.html https://blog.getresponse.com/tips-writers-boost-productivity.html#respondMon, 14 Aug 2017 15:30:17 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30481When a marketing campaign works, celebrating new leads and increasing sales numbers is the natural tendency. Sometimes, vital components of a marketing campaign – like design, email, content, and SEO – get completely overlooked. Each of these core elements requires the skill of an expert marketer. Unfortunately, many of these skills get underrated or misunderstood. […]

]]>When a marketing campaign works, celebrating new leads and increasing sales numbers is the natural tendency. Sometimes, vital components of a marketing campaign – like design, email, content, and SEO – get completely overlooked. Each of these core elements requires the skill of an expert marketer. Unfortunately, many of these skills get underrated or misunderstood.

Writing is perhaps the most misunderstood skill of the bunch. We all write in some capacity, which causes people who don’t write well to assume it comes naturally to those who do. But answering an email or sending a text isn’t the same thing as writing creative and informative content.

So let’s make one thing clear: writing is not easy.

In our fast-paced digital world, the difficulty of creating great content gets magnified. With everybody clamoring for more content and faster production rates, the pressure to write can get overwhelming.

Whether you’re a freelance content marketer writing from home, or part of a team in an office, here are four things you can do to boost your productivity:

Structure your day.

The idea of structure flies in the face of many creative ideologies, and there are successful writers out there who would say structure ruins their process.

But, there are plenty of reasons writers should structure their day, especially if they feel like they’re stuck in a productivity rut.

For freelance writers or those who work from home, distraction – or any reason not to write – is everywhere. Whether it’s a household task or an errand to run, it’s common to push writing to the side when the words aren’t flowing. When you structure your day with a schedule, it’s easier to run your errands when it’s time to run errands and write when it’s time to write.

A structured day is all about helping you do your tasks by reducing the number of decisions you have to make. Do what the schedule says, and you’ll get more done. I know, “easier said than done,” but if you’re a writer that gets easily distracted, maybe testing a more structured process to your day will help. What have you got to lose?

Don’t wait for perfection.

In terms of writing to perfection, I have one piece of advice: don’t do it. A writer either crafts every sentence to perfection, working on each sentence until it’s just right, or they let the words flow and rely on editing.

Consider these time frames. Let’s assume there are roughly 60 sentences in a 1000 word blog post. We’ll allow two hours for research and ideation of a post. If a writer can write free-form, we’ll give them one minute per sentence – so 60 minutes to write the post. Add another hour for editing. If a writer doesn’t write to perfection, in total, it’s about four hours of steady work.

But, if writing each sentence to perfection takes an average of three times longer – now, that’s three minutes per sentence. If we allow the same time allocation for research and ideation but cut editing time in half, that’s five and a half hours to create the same 1000 word blog post. An hour and a half longer for the “perfectionist” writer, and that’s assuming you can ever get past the first sentence!

It’s easier said than done, but for productivity’s sake, don’t wait for perfection. Besides, who’s to say your idea of perfection will match that of the readers?!

Start.

Writers everywhere, including myself, shudder when they read that sentence – only because of how true it rings.

Every writer knows the first sentence of a blog post is the hook that pulls in the reader. For writers stuck on perfection, the first sentence is a nightmare because it’s difficult to get right the first time.

My advice, which holds true to what I said about perfection, is just to start writing. The best way to start writing is to skip the first sentence – maybe even the first paragraph – and get the cold hard facts and ideas down on the page. Once you have the body of the post done, it’s surprising how much easier it is to write the introduction – and that all important first sentence.

Take fun breaks.

It’s important for writers to remember they need breaks too. For writers who work from home and are itching to do those chores or errands, leave those tasks for after hours. Take fun breaks instead.

Look, sometimes writing isn’t fun, even if you’re good at it. What’s the point in taking a break to do something else that takes a lot of effort, like a chore or an errand? That won’t feel like much of a break.

Writers: take a mindless break that allows you to relax. Walk or play with your pets if you work from home. Fire up a game on your phone or computer if you’re at the office or a coffee shop. If you have the freedom, call a friend for a quick chat. Or, engage in some “watercooler” discussions with your colleagues, like what happened on the last episode of Game of Thrones.

Breaks should give you an opportunity to recharge your batteries, not sap even more of your mental energy.

Conclusion

Writing is a tough gig, even more so in today’s content-hungry digital world. For writers, the key to increased productivity is putting aside expectations, deadlines, and perfection. These things only add to the difficulties of writing.

The most important thing for a writer to do is to structure their time behind the keyboard. Never sit down and stare at your screen again. Have a plan and stick to it.

For writers out there: have you tried any of these methods for boosting your productivity? What are some of your unique tactics for coaxing your words onto the page? We’re all about helping marketers up their productivity, and we’d love to hear your tips and tricks!

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/tips-writers-boost-productivity.html/feed0Authenticity Matters: The Marketer’s Guide to Choosing Compelling User-Generated Photoshttps://blog.getresponse.com/compelling-user-generated-content.html https://blog.getresponse.com/compelling-user-generated-content.html#respondThu, 10 Aug 2017 16:59:02 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30471Marketers and writers of the world, let’s chat about something important, yet overlooked: The visuals that accompany our written work. If you’re anything like me, you probably just let out an audible groan. Bonus points if it startled the person next to you. Visuals are usually left to the creative directors and designers in the […]

]]>Marketers and writers of the world, let’s chat about something important, yet overlooked: The visuals that accompany our written work. If you’re anything like me, you probably just let out an audible groan. Bonus points if it startled the person next to you.

Visuals are usually left to the creative directors and designers in the office. But when those visually gifted folks aren’t around, we tend to slap a vaguely related microstock photo on top of our content and call it a day. Or if we’ve had a little more caffeine than usual, we’ll open Canva and spruce up the stock photo with a quote or headline. It’s not our fault when visuals aren’t our area of expertise.

Over time, though, I discovered that more authentic visuals can spur target audiences to click on and engage with your work — obviously an important goal. My perspective shifted even more after taking a Content Editor position at a photo-licensing startup called Scopio. As it turns out, user-generated content — or UGC — isn’t just a great tool for marketers and writers, but also for editors and designers. These visuals just feel more human compared to the ones you’d find on stock websites.

The problem? A lot of folks aren’t sure where to find great user-generated photos. Sometimes, they’re not even sure how to use them.

When it comes time to choose visuals to complement email campaigns, blogs, social media posts and other forms of written content, don’t be afraid to try something user-generated (or at least more realistic). Keep these pointers handy, too!

If your image of choice happens to be a typical microstock photo (think someone with a too-perfect grin framed by a heavily photoshopped background), that image just wasn’t created for anyone in particular. It was born with one goal in mind: To become a flawless, one-size-fits-all art piece.

If you’ve ever seen the same stock photo used over and over in marketing articles or on company websites, you’ve seen this concept in action. The Wall Street Journal noticed this embarrassing faux pas back in 2006, but stock photo sharing is still commonplace. If you don’t believe me, do a reverse Google image search on a free stock photo.

When choosing images for blogs, social media posts and other types of written content, it’s up to you whether your photo is up to par. Does it speak to your message? And more importantly, does it align with your audience’s goals and values? If you didn’t answer these questions with an instant “yes,” you might just want to switch things up.

For those who write for larger agencies, brands or companies, it’d definitely be worth it to look into a platform that helps you find and license user-generated photos and videos, as they tend to be more, well, real.

In fact, a study by Crowdtap and Ipsos Media CT noted that millennials find user-generated content 35% more memorable and 50% more trustworthy than other forms of media. And though this study looks at UGC as a whole, it’s a good indicator of the images we should be moving toward.

I see this at work every day. When companies, nonprofits, media outlets and others use user-generated content to tell stories, they end up with better engagement, click-through rates and ROI just by publishing something more relatable. That’s powerful.

Think “human”

Photo by Carmen Ramirez/Scopio submission

Audiences respond to visuals that are more candid or human, meaning you’ll also earn more engagement when you use them. Think back to a memorable piece of writing or advertising that you’ve seen. It probably has a human element.

The visuals we use don’t have to carry the same weight, but they should feel real rather than staged — think groups of people planting trees for Earth Day rather than something resembling Microsoft’s classic “Bliss,” or a candid photo from a lifestyle blog instead of a posed family photoshoot.

The most obvious way to go about this is to choose photographs with faces. Back in 2014, a Georgia Tech study noted that posting photos with faces on social media upped the likelihood of receiving likes and comments by 38% and 32%, respectively. “It is widely accepted in neuroscience that face perception is perhaps the most highly developed human visual skill,” they wrote.

However, it seems that not all photos featuring faces are created equal. The Nielsen Norman Group suggests that while viewers on a web page pay close attention to photos of everyday people (in this case, portraits on a company’s “about” page), they make a hard pass on “stock photos of generic people” used to spruce up web pages. The lesson here isn’t that user-generated content is a cure-all for marketers — it’s that audiences sniff out inauthenticity more than we think, and it could help to feature something more trustworthy. Going forward, this data should spark more conversations about the effectiveness of stock photography versus UGC or in-house photos and videos.

If you want to avoid dead-end visuals, it’s as simple as searching through hashtags and keywords on social media and licensing a candid photo from someone. And if you have a bigger wallet to work with, try hiring a photographer to create the kind of visuals you’re looking for.

Even if candid photos with faces aren’t a good match for your content, there are other ways to use this to your advantage. Whether it’s a beloved Golden Retriever, a pair of hands holding sunglasses or an indistinct city scene, choose a photo buzzing with life to project authenticity.

Go beyond static on blogs

Photo by @veryjinjing/Instagram

Resist the urge to just write a few paragraphs on a blog post and call it a day. Instead, try including more actionable elements for your readers to glance at or play around with. This simple trick is often overlooked by writers, but can boost stats like you wouldn’t believe.

To create something dynamic, the first step is to give your readers some breathing space. That’s actually as simple as using relatable photos to break your writing up into digestible chunks.

Research from BuzzSumo supports this. After analyzing more than a million articles, they found that the golden ratio of pictures to words is about 1 image per 75 to 100 words. This magic number can also double shares on social media as opposed to articles with less visuals.

But don’t limit this just to photos. The actionable elements I’m talking about can be anything from an embedded Tweet to a gallery of user-generated content images sourced from social media, which could increase your pageview time by 90%.

Go ahead: Play around and find a solution that works for your readers.

Avoid legal grey areas

Photo by James McMinn Jr./Scopio submission

It’s safe to assume that most of us wouldn’t steal a painting or sculpture, brush it over with a few coats of paint it and sell it to an art gallery under our name. And even though digital photos should be treated with the same deference, stolen content is far too familiar in the era of social media.

If you’d like to edit and publish a photo or video you sourced from a social site, great! But be prepared — either have a watertight legal agreement drafted up for photographers to sign or try out a platform that does the hard work for you. This will help avoid the legal grey areas that could get your team in trouble and tarnish your brand’s image.

Embedding user-generated photos and videos is another option, but the effect can wear off after a while. You’ll have the freedom to creatively repurpose photos and videos if you can get the rights to them.

As the old saying goes: It’s better to be safe than sorry … Or in legal trouble.

In conclusion

User-generated content — including images and photography — can add an element of authenticity that encourages consumers to engage with and interact with your company… which can, down the line, lead to increased sales. Have you successfully incorporated user-generated content into your marketing? Tell us about it in the comments below.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/compelling-user-generated-content.html/feed0Online Marketing Growth Tactics for Small Businesshttps://blog.getresponse.com/online-marketing-growth-tactics.html https://blog.getresponse.com/online-marketing-growth-tactics.html#commentsWed, 09 Aug 2017 15:16:26 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30447Every new business or old must know how to attract customers in order to become successful. The most essential part of marketing is learning about your customers’ wants and needs, and products and services which meet their requirements. Every good marketer knows how to stay a step ahead of the new trends and curves of […]

]]>Every new business or old must know how to attract customers in order to become successful. The most essential part of marketing is learning about your customers’ wants and needs, and products and services which meet their requirements.

Every good marketer knows how to stay a step ahead of the new trends and curves of the market and come up with good ideas to deliver their brand. Above all this, a good marketer needs to be creative. Sadly, an uncreative marketing strategist will come up with the same old strategies that people already know about and have played out.

These tactics are not effective anymore. These are seven important marketing tactics that work for almost every business, whether they are startups or established businesses.

Video marketing

It is easier to attract an audience through entertaining and engaging videos, as opposed to written content. 60% of consumers prefer to buy things that they have watched on their television screens. This is the power of video marketing!

Email marketing

This strategy might sound ineffective, old-school and over-rated. But that is wrong. Email marketing is powerful, and those who are using it are collecting huge revenues. People who claim that it doesn’t work are the ones who doesn’t know how to use it correctly. Email marketing provides customers information regarding the latest news and insights.

Mobile marketing

Over time, mobile phones usage has surpassed desktop computers. As a result, there is a great push in the market for companies to ensure that their websites are optimized for mobile browsing. This was the first step toward becoming mobile friendly. The journey wasn’t over, the technology involves a lot of other factors, too.

The following are mobile technologies that every business should begin implementing:

Mobile Apps: This may sound expensive because of high price point of mobile development and many small business miss it out, but this is highly effective. Although, there are some DIY affordable app builders that can allow companies to enter into mobile-centric world.

Mobile Payment Services: Whether shopping in-store or online shopping, customers nowadays want to pay though the simplest methods possible. Customers are adopting services like Apple Pay and Google Wallet. If you haven’t yet offered this payment option to your customers, you are missing out on possible revenue.

Marketing via blogging

Many businesses already have blogs that they update and publish regularly. But the question is if that is effective? Well, the answer is yes! If you have a good SEO team who knows where to publish what and how will grab the audience then there’s a good chance that you will get noticed. But audiences these days have started to notice that how valuable and authentic good writing is. If your content is not interesting and informative, people will lose the interest right after going through two or three lines. If you really want to engage the audience to read out your blogs, get an expert blog writer with good writing skills.

The power of follow-up

Marketing is not just about advertising about your product and trying to attract them to buy it, it’s a lot more than that. It covers a variety of things, like taking follow ups from people. It builds a connection and trust between buyer and supplier. You can take advantage of the chance to link feedback and complains from your customers to the rest of your business because it provides marketers and business owners with insight that they can use to improve their business, products and overall customer experience.

Make sure to keep your internet surveys simple and personalized. No one likes to dedicate more than two three minutes on internet surveys because clients and customers don’t have time for that. Simple and customized surveys with having just few questions are more actual and customers are most likely to fill them.

Make quizzes and surveys

If people are asked to play a video game or visit some not so interesting websites, they will prefer the game in a heartbeat. If fun factors like creating quizzes and games to engage and grab attention are added to the websites, you are more likely to convert the audience into customer.

Keep social media pages updated

Social media has an audience of more than 3 billion people from across the globe. Two billion of them are active. Without an active social media presence, there are fewer chances that your business will be successful. Lacking official social media profiles on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Google+ would be a missed opportunity for those businesses looking to get exposure to reach the maximum number of people in digital market. If you regularly update your brand’s social media account, people subconsciously start to view your firm as an authority.

Whether you want to promote a product and create awareness in the market, or build relationships with customers, or drive new sales – social media is a great platform for you. You can also add pictures and quotes on your page to gain audience. Never forget to cite your content if you are copying it from somewhere. There are citation machines available that provides you with the correct formats of citation. For instance, if you want to cite in CSE format, you can search for CSE Citation Maker on the web that will provide you with an instant citation.

In conclusion

Any of these techniques can help a small business grow. Use these online marketing growth tactics in combination, and you’ll have a much better and stronger marketing plan.

Have you used any of these in your marketing efforts? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/online-marketing-growth-tactics.html/feed46 Success Factors of Ecommerce Business Strategyhttps://blog.getresponse.com/6-success-factors-ecommerce-business-strategy.html https://blog.getresponse.com/6-success-factors-ecommerce-business-strategy.html#commentsTue, 08 Aug 2017 19:23:42 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30439As an entrepreneur, getting into ecommerce is a significant step towards growing a business and increasing profits. For those who are just starting a business, ecommerce can potentially be the foundation of a profitable company. Whichever you are, know that ecommerce is not simply putting up your products online and hoping for the best. There […]

]]>As an entrepreneur, getting into ecommerce is a significant step towards growing a business and increasing profits. For those who are just starting a business, ecommerce can potentially be the foundation of a profitable company. Whichever you are, know that ecommerce is not simply putting up your products online and hoping for the best.

There is a good bit of strategy that goes into making it work. Understanding how ecommerce can affect a business is crucial in making it a success.

What is ecommerce today?

Ecommerce is now ubiquitous to business in developed countries, but developing countries have yet to catch up with its adoption. However, things have been coming along as ecommerce has started to grow in a big way throughout Asia, especially in China.

In the meantime, mobile has pretty much become the biggest thing in ecommerce these days. However, a lot of businesses aren’t converting to m-commerce fast enough to make the most of the mobile user base. With the ecommerce market becoming more competitive than ever before, this may change down the line, as businesses continue to find new ways to gain an edge.

There is also a future in subscription-based business models. Presently, there are already a number of online services that offers monthly subscriptions for a variety of things. Expect this business model to grow even more in the coming years.

Six factors in ecommerce success:

1. Regulation of product pricing

It’s natural for customers to compare prices between brands. It’s expected of entrepreneurs, as well, to be aware of how much competitors are charging for their goods. Fortunately, there are different tools available to easily see and compare prices of competing ecommerce websites, such as DataCrops and Import.io.

Various pricing strategies are employed to get the sweet spot in attractiveness and earnings, depending on the market and the kind of products being priced. For instance, one of the most common pricing strategies is keystone pricing, which is basically the doubling of wholesale price.

That usually works, but consider additional factors so the price is just right, not too high or too low. There is also discount pricing, psychological pricing, competitive pricing, value-based pricing, and so on.

2. Maintaining high quality products

For a long time, people had the notion that products from ecommerce sites were inferior quality when compared to products from physical stores. While much of that myth no longer exists these days, there is still a lot that must be done to convince customers that your products are comparable in quality as those found in malls and other stores.

Make sure you procure your products from well-known and trusted suppliers of high quality goods as well.

Your must uphold your standards consistently across the board. If you ever ship a subpar product to a customer, it will definitely be a blow to your business even if you have a return/replacement policy in place. Overall customer satisfaction is crucial to the business’ continued survival, and bad product quality can break your business down.

Keep System feedback transparent to the changes in input, and corrective action must be taken as soon as possible. This is a continuing process as there are always other ways to improve.

3. Improving store accessibility

The design of your ecommerce website (online store) must accommodate all types of customers. The online store is your main tool of communicating and transacting with them. It must be able to relay information fast and concisely to evoke the trustworthiness of your business to your customers.

Accessibility is of utmost importance as it helps your business be within reach to all sorts of customers; i.e. people of different cultures, people with disabilities, etc. Being able to have your online store set to other languages can potentially widen your customer base, as long as they are a significant part of your audience. It may also be accessible to people with visual disabilities like color blindness and impaired vision, by using high-contrast visual theme and a larger font size for text.

There are also things you can do to make the online store viewed better by mobile devices, such as using responsive design and optimizing your images so they can load faster. The more you improve your website’s accessibility, the more people can potentially view it.

4. Making a wonderful first impression

Users know if they like a website or not by just a glance, and that first impression usually lasts. Making a good first impression is imperative in getting more customers in your online store. Make the best, eye-catching design possible, in order to entice people into coming in and making use of your ecommerce website.

Good web design has principles you can follow that will help you convince people to take a look at what you have. It should not be too loud nor too barren. Everything on it should be easy to understand, yet maintains its own personality.

5. Securing your shipments

One of the main concerns with ecommerce for both entrepreneurs and consumers is the issue of security. With personal and financial information being handled online, there is always the potential for ecommerce websites being compromised and customer data stolen for nefarious purposes. This is especially true for credit card information that gets entered in online every single day.

Make use of SSL to secure your customers’ online shopping experience. SSL ensures that transactions and data are encrypted so that there is less of a chance for them to be compromised. Two-factor authentication is also a good way to further secure your online store, and adding other verification methods (without making it too hard for your customers) should help as well.

6. Taking advantage of m-commerce

The mobile user base has grown exponentially over the last few years, thereby the need for online stores to become mobile commerce ready has become virtually mandatory at this point. If your online store is not optimized for mobile devices, then you are missing out on a lot of business.

Some of the things that make an online store optimized for m-commerce are things like responsive design with easy-to-use navigation menus, solid mobile search features, and easy checkout and payment, all done over mobile. You need not have a mobile app to do it, just have your website optimized for mobile if possible

Conclusion

If you’re looking to get into ecommerce, there is certainly no better time than now. With a public that has been getting more and more familiar with the use of ecommerce to avail of various products and services, we are going to see more amazing things through ecommerce for both entrepreneurs and consumers.

]]>https://blog.getresponse.com/6-success-factors-ecommerce-business-strategy.html/feed14 Incredible Examples of Interactive Contenthttps://blog.getresponse.com/examples-interactive-content.html https://blog.getresponse.com/examples-interactive-content.html#commentsMon, 07 Aug 2017 18:22:14 +0000https://blog.getresponse.com/?p=30410Marketing techniques may always be evolving – but even with all the wonderful technologies that are ushering in a new phase where content is not only visually breathtaking but interactive to boot, the underlying principles remain the same. These can be summed up in the age-old acronym of AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. However, […]

]]>Marketing techniques may always be evolving – but even with all the wonderful technologies that are ushering in a new phase where content is not only visually breathtaking but interactive to boot, the underlying principles remain the same. These can be summed up in the age-old acronym of AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

Here’s an idea: interactive content

But what do we mean by ‘interactive content’? Well, often it’s best to illustrate with examples – and here four great ones to give you some inspiration for how to start introducing interactive elements into your own content output.

1. Are you a meeting MVP?

Citrix offer technical solutions to enable better collaboration, secure data sharing, improved workflow and other efficiencies. One tool the company offers is GoToMeeting – a web app that companies can use to host online conferences. How better to demonstrate their understanding of meeting productivity than to present their audience with a tool that measures the value and effectiveness of meetings?

Their interactive content challenges the audience to find out if they are a “Meeting MVP.”

They could have just as easily written a blog discussing the factors that contribute to a meeting’s value: the cost of staff downtime, whether follow-up actions are determined necessary, and whether follow-up actions are indeed followed up, for example.

Instead, they ask the participant to answer some simple questions.

At the end of the assessment, which takes only a few seconds, participants are presented with their results.

Wouldn’t you love to know you are a “Quality Collaborator?”

This piece of content is an excellent marketing device. It has a fun look and feel, is easy to use, takes seconds and gives meaningful insight to the user. It’s a great example of simple and effective interactive marketing.

2. Realize real results

Blackbaud helps non-profit organizations become more efficient by offering a range of software solutions and other services. With many happy customer success stories to talk about, Blackbaud’s marketing team was keen to illustrate the results rather than just tell the stories.

They developed a microsite, Realize Real Results, which offers interactive content including calculators, quizzes and surveys, as well as other static case studies and infographics. By extrapolating the results from the real-life case studies and applying these findings to data submitted by participants, the content enables users to gauge exactly how they would benefit from Blackbaud’s software solutions.

When clicking on any of the calls to action (CTAs) – as displayed in the above screenshot – users are greeted with various pieces of interactive content that they are encouraged to engage with. Here’s the short questionnaire that pops up when clicking the “Work Smarter, Not Harder” box, for example (and note that the copy also references Blackbaud’s existing users who have had success with the solution).

The results of Blackbaud’s marketing efforts speak for themselves. This campaign gained more than 800 qualified leads in seven months and helped the sales team achieve 141% of their quota attainment in just one quarter. It also bagged a DemandGen Killer Content Award for Interactive Content.

3. Great yield mystery

Mining company Mosaic is the world’s largest supplier of phosphate and potash, and has a mission to “help the world grow the food it needs.”

Keen to increase awareness of how crop nutrition affects crop size and crop health, the company produced a series of podcasts serializing the experiences of fictional farmer, Gerald Fitzgerald, and his brother Darrell.

The series was hosted on a microsite, Great Yield Mystery, and then promoted through social channels. In the story, Gerald and his brother were trying to figure out why they were experiencing such low yields. Podcasts and case files gave clues as to what could be causing the yield issues.

Listeners to the podcasts were invited to help solve the case, and received small prizes for solving smaller mysteries along the way. A grand prize was up for grabs for anybody who could solve The Great Yield Mystery.

Attracting 1586 episode downloads and 1764 sessions on the microsite, the campaign was a huge success and more than worthy of its DemandGen Killer Content Award.

4. Making financial services funky

Militello Capital is an investment management company. It came up with an imaginative and useful way of educating people on 26 different ways of investing.

Miltello partnered with RealReport™ to create an easy to use interactive infographic that vividly illustrated how the various investment types worked. By clicking on the various elements of the graphic, the information is sorted much more clearly.

By making investment mechanisms clear, tangible and transparent, they were able to educate their customers while winning trust at the same time.